Blogger Interview: The Brix Chicks

In Mutineer Magazine Issue 3 we highlight twelve blogs that were represented at the Wine Bloggers Conference. Here is the first of twelve full interviews from the conference.

Site: www.brixchicks.com
Bloggers: Liza S. & Xandria P.
Location: Oakland, CA
Launched: August 2008

Mutineer Magazine: Most blogs are written by a single person. How do you approach writing the blog as a team?
Liza: The philosophy of our blog is ‘adventures in wine are all around’, and we’re trying to share that experience with our readers, so we immediately share it together when we are going out and learning about different kinds of wine and food and how the two interact. So we immediately share experiences together, but then have a different take on things when it comes to the blog.

What was the inspiration to start the blog?
Liza: It’s very interesting because we actually met at a wine tasting, and what we found is that as we got to be more serious about wine and food pairing, our friends would just roll their eyes at us, but we become so impassioned by the discoveries that we made with wine and food, particularly in Northern California, the opportunities to learn and explore and experience different things all around us that we bonded over that and started looking for more opportunities to explore food and wine.

Talk about the blog as it is today.
Liza: The blog is more or less a journal of the different things that we are experiencing at events, exploring topics that interest us, and that being said, we have a little bit of a divergent sense in what interests us. We have a strong interest in sustainability and green topics, with Xandria being the palate.
Xandria: I’m not a super taster, I write more about my wine experiences while describing the wine and talking about why I liked it.

How do your different perspectives and levels of experience translate into the blog?
Liza: I tend to get more involved with commercial topics, I have a big interest in fine dining and food and wine pairing, whereas Xandria tends to be much more about actual wine along with food and wine pairing.
Xandria: I think what we get into is what is interesting to us at the moment, which includes lots of topics.

Do you rate wines on the blog?
Liza: No, we do not rate them, we just describe them.
Xandria: We believe that ratings are challenging because a person’s perceptions are so unique and so personal and based on your own experiences and tastes, literally. So what we try and do is share with people our experiences while making recommendations for things we really consider to be wonderful, and if we aren’t into something we just don’t blog about it.

Why should people be excited about your blog?
Liza: Adventures in wine are all around, and we are looking forward to readers commenting on their own adventures while giving us feedback on what we’ve done.

Do you think your blog has a strong feminine voice?
We can’t help but have a feminine voice being that we are both females, not to mention the name of the blog “Brixchicks”.

So if the blog did not have a gender identity to its name, would readers still notice that feminine voice?
Liza: Gender colors experiences, and I think that the female influence is a part of our writing just because that is the frame of reference of everything that we do. It’s not pink, and it’s not girly, but you can tell that there is a strong feminine vibe to the work we do on the blog.

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