I've started to use Posterous, a free blogging service, to make posts on this blog. Some readers might wonder why I'm starting to use this service and not just post directly in Wordpress, so here's why. The short answer is it's a lot faster for me to create a post in email than blogging directly inside the Wordpress editor.

What Posterous does is create an easily maintainable blog but can also be used to auto-post to popular social sites like Twitter, Flickr and Facebook. So I think this might be a great option for wineries who want to blog but don't want to invest the time and effort of maintaining a more full featured blog. All you need to do is signup for a free account (since you are on Facebook, you can sign in with your Facebook login), wire up all your social hubs (places like Twitter, Facebook, Flickr and LinkedIn) and start blogging. If you want to use a custom URL you can easily set this up and I would also wire up your Feedburner and Google Analytics accounts so you can track visitors.

Since Posterous is optimized for email posting, you can post to your blog from any computer or your mobile phone. One scenario I would envision for a winery is a winemaker dinner or other event where you have taken a number of photos on your iPhone. At the end of the evening just write a couple of paragraphs in the iPhone mail app and attach a selection of your photos. Send to your special Posterous email address and in a few minutes a very nicely formatted photo gallery will appear in your post and your social hubs are automatically updated at the same time. I'm sure even the most busy winemaker or winery owner can find a few minutes to post via email 2 or 3 times a week. And Posterous just rolled out a new feature that allows groups to share a single account so everyone from the winery can participate on your new blog.

So give Posterous a try. It's free and easy to setup and use but is also very flexible via all the ways you can post via email (which I found out with yesterday's post which went to my personal blog and Twitter accounts and not where I originally intended). You can find out about all these advanced features on their FAQ and blog.

And did I mention you can post from your iPhone, Blackberry or another other phone that can send email? Yes, even you have the time to blog.