(WSJ) - I SPENT THE BETTER part of last week doing something that relatively few wine drinkers probably do: reading wine blogs. Not just a handful of blogs here and there but hundreds and hundreds of wine blogs from all over the world. I read until I was absolutely blog-bleary; I probably totaled 10,000 page views.

I did this partly out of curiosity. I don't read many wine blogs, and I wondered what I might be missing. What was being discussed? What wines, wineries and topics were hot? After all, people in the wine trade have called bloggers a powerful force, capable of challenging—perhaps even eclipsing—traditional media and conventional wine critics. I'm not sure if that's true, but the numbers are certainly impressive. There are about 1,450 wine blogs today, of which about 1,000 are nonprofessional endeavors (the rest are "industry" blogs), according to Allan Wright of the Zephyr Adventures tour operator, who has organized Wine Bloggers Conferences in North America for the past five years. But most bloggers haven't been doing it very long: "Only 18% of [wine] bloggers today have been blogging for more than six years," he said.