Max Hauser wrote:

>> . (At that time, late 93 and early 94, I and presumably other older
>participants were not active, or we might possibly have steered it
back >to plan, which was rec.food.drink.wine). For a period, there were
two >competing wine newsgroups, RFD and AFW. Eventually the volume
shifted >to AFW. This all coincided with the exploding public interest
in >networked computers after the Mosaic web browser in 1993. Good
people >subsequently discovered AFW and set themselves up as regulars.
By >active participation they manage to achieve a higher standard of
>exchange than can be found on some moderated HTTP wine sites now.
>Albeit with the glaring incongruity in newsgroup naming: three of four
>specialty beverage groups under "rec." as they always were, and the
>fourth, one of the largest and actually oldest, under "alt."


I was posting to rec.food.wine in 1991 when the first proposal for
alt.wine was raised by someone in England. In the late fall of 1992
the newsgroup had hardly anything except discussions of a new group.
There were already two subgroups of red.food.drink at the time (and
I don't remember them now ) but there was constant argument why we
should not have a new group. Finally in February 1993 we were doing a
very informal vote which someone might have kept track of but the anti-
new group group won. Among us disenchanted types we constantly talked
about a new group all spring. One of the big draw backs was the name.
Alt.oenophiles was proposed ( and I think that it was proposed by the
same guy that had proposed alt.wine two years earlier )to keep the non
serious fans out. Finally one of my cohorts at Cray Research up in
Beaverton, OR sent out a message on July 4,1993 announcing the new group
as alt.wine.I believe that Dean Tudor sent the second message
congratulating the group. And here it is 12 years later. So how did you
vote Max?