This forum has carried birthday greetings to nations and to people, so why not the group itself?
Terse history:
Created by Charles Wetherell 27 Feb 1982 as net.wines, first posting . It was a planned spin-off from the food newsgroup (net.cooks, now rec.food.cooking), created 29 January 82). Scope: "All topics covering alcoholic beverages, including wine, beer, hard liquor, wine making, beer making, and, if you prefer this group to net.cooks, recipes using alcohol. If there is enough traffic, we can, of course, create subgroups for particular topics. During the poll, I did receive a request that new recipes for obscure cocktails be limited." (Wetherell)
George Otto couldn't wait for the new wine newsgroup, and sent his first wine posting 19 Feb 82 to net.cooks. (This maybe set a precedent. :-)
The Great Renaming of late 1986 brought newsgroup names familiar today. Net.wines became rec.food.drink which thrived into the 1990s. Both net.wines and rec.food.drink carried some information hard to find through other, more mainstream sources. (I read and posted reference and tasting information and a few parodies, fairly steadily from 1983 to 1992, and set up an Internet wine mailing list in 1985.)
rec.food.drink eventually formed subgroups (as Charles Wetherell had originally proposed):
rec.food.drink.beer rec.food.drink.coffee rec.food.drink.tea
This was not a smooth process, characteristically for such an anarchic enterprise as the newsgroups. Readers and their visions came and (sometimes rapidly) went. Some proposals for subgroups met with resistance, and this in turn with impatience. A subgroup for beer appeared first in the anything-goes "alt" newsgroups (themselves initiated 1987, I posted history here). That group later returned to the rec.food.drink hierarchy. What is historically remarkable is that wine (the prototype liquid forum subject) also jumped over to "alt" but hasn't yet returned. There actually were two active, competing wine newsgroups for a couple of years in the middle 1990s (RFD and AFW), a situation not always very clear to readers. Recent FAQ information still shows RFD as the wine newsgroup. (Given different
1992-1994 history, regulars now would know this group -- fondly maybe -- as rec.food.drink.wine, RFDW. The "alt" location has caused other issues also, besides misleading indexing.)Whatever it's called though, the wine newsgroup has attracted some good current people and is an unusual example of an unmoderated forum with content of value. Here is a glass of Champagne. [1998 Michel Dervin Brut. Small house, inexpensive, unusual value.]
To the wine newsgroup!