Well, you may have heard that the original wine slinger, Ben Hilzinger, is moving on to rainier pastures in Seattle. Benny (as we affectionately call him) has been the face of Nectar for nearly 2 and 1/2 years. Check out my touching tribute to him here. After an exhaustive search, I am excited to announce that we have found our next Tasting Room Manager for Nectar.

Meet…Ben! Yup, we hired Ben. For now we’re calling him Ben 2.0 but his real name is Ben Simons. The criteria for taking over at Nectar were, knowledge of wine, tech savvy, personable, a back ground in the service industry, and must have the name Ben. This made the search very difficult. Of all the applicants we got, only one was named Ben. Luckily, he fit the bill with all the other qualifications.

Ironically I met Ben Simons about 4 years ago when I started this blog, drinknectar.com. Ben had burst onto the scene with a great blog called Vinotology (like Scientology but the religion of wine). Tweeting and blogging from the great state of Texas, Ben and I quickly became fast “twitter buddies.” I got to meet him at the 2010 Wine Bloggers Conference in Walla Walla and in 2010 he and his wife, Beth, moved to the Northwest! Ben was one of the great free agent acquisitions in the blogging world and we were fortunate to have him bring his talents to the state of Washington. Check out this fun video we did announcing his move to Washington wine country.

I’m very excited to have Mr. Vinotology join the Nectar team. He is currently the online brand manager and lead story teller at Alexandria Nicole Winery in Prosser. He brings a great skill set with him and will be helping with Nectar marketing, tasting room management, graphic work and will also be a key part to the growth of my other company nectarMEDIA. Ben will be assisting me in managing our growing client list and gives us the ability to add additional clients. Ben is a great copy writer, very creative, and has experience and mad skills at web design too.

Take a moment to visit his web site Vinotology.com, follow him on Twitter @vinotology, and give him a very warm welcome in the comments below. His official start date is June 1, but he will be hanging around Nectar over the next few weeks as he and Beth get situated in Spokane.