Part of Château de Chenonceau on the Cher

I'm delighted to see that Jim's Loire has attracted just over 250,000 visits since September 2008. Our thanks to all of our readers, in particular those who visit these pages regularly.

As well as passing a significant milestone – next up 500,000! – today has seen the sentencing of Paul Craven and Oseghale Hayble for their part in defrauding investors who believed they were buying First Growth Bordeaux. Instead they were fuelling the fraudsters' coke-driven spending splurge.

See report on sentencing here.

Following today's stage in the Tour de France I have updated the list of all-time stage wins here.

Trying out a new scanner...

 Saint-Bacchus: Jim, Christine Ontivèro, Michel Smith and André Dominé

Saint-Bacchus: Liz Morcom MW, Lisa Barnard, Jim, Tim Johnston, Giles MacDonogh, Tim Atkin and Anthony Rose

 

Saint-Bacchus (another year): includes Myriam Huet, Olivier Poussier, Stephen Brook, Tim Atkin

 

Circle of Wine Writers tasting: John  Livingstone-Learmonth, unknown, Alastair Mackenzie, Lilyane Weston, Charlotte Lessing, Pamela Vandyke Price, John McNerney (behind)

Candes St-Martin: at the confluence of the Vienne and La Loire

Inspired and informed by the European Wine Bloggers Conference I've added a few new bits and pieces to Jim's Loire. There is now an RSS feed and it is now possible to search the site – a new gadget from Blogger. I have also installed the Zemanta add-on in the Firefox browser that helps by suggesting links, tags and links to similar articles on the net.

Having only installed Zemanta last night it is obviously still early days. However, the suggested links to articles seem rather limited in scope. When writing up today's post on the European Wine Bloggers Conference only a few of articles and blogs written around the conference came up. Also the suggested photos from my Flickr account look a rather random selection. Talking of pictures I have changed the licence both on Jim's Loire and on Flickr to a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative one.

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