1 Wine Dude » wine blogging

You Are The Wine Conversation (What’s A Wine Critic To Do When Everyone Is A Wine Critic?)

1WineDude — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 13:00:00 +0000

IntoWine.com recently (at least I think it was recently, as their posts for reasons unknown to me aren’t dated) ran an interview with SF Chronicle wine editor Jon Bonné (long-time readers will recall that roughly a year ago I was on a panel about writing better opinion pieces with Jon and the Wall Street Journal’s Lettie Teague, both of whom probably still in therapy trying to get over my inclusion; I’m kidding… I think…).

I’m not here today to dissect Jon’s responses (many of which ring true for me, and are worth a read because he’s a very, very intelligent guy), but one answer he gave to the IntoWine folks struck me as a bit odd. To the tape (emphasis is mine):

“The average consumer still feels intimidated by wine and wine-speak. Are publications like the Chronicle partly responsible for the prevalent feeling among consumers that wine is somehow beyond their comprehension?

If we’re going point fingers at the idea that wine is pretentious, let’s start with the spread of overpriced, mass-produced wine sold as an aspirational luxury. I’ll borrow a phrase from a conversation with a fellow writer a few days ago: You write up to your audience, not down. If sportswriters had to explain a two-point conversion every time they mentioned it, we’d all die of boredom. That’s not an excuse to fall into jargon. But there is no shortage of amateur wine criticism out there that doesn’t contribute to the conversation.”

The trouble for me is that I’ve got no idea what conversation Jon is talking about in that response.

It might be that there is a hidden wine conversation, one available only to a Romanée-Conti-sipping secret society of critics with wine review superpowers like UV vision that can detect the exact number of Brett, fruit, and mushroom particles floating around in a glass of Burgundy and determine at a glance if they are at an appropriate level. A secret society that meets in an underground lair at an undisclosed location (guarded by pools of sharks with lazer beams attached to their heads) and through joint nefarious consensus determines what wines will get the really high scores this year.

The bottom line is that this secret society might as well also be made up of Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy and the Easter Bunny, because the real wine conversation is actually the one that the amateur critics are having. Or, I should say, it’s the thousands of real and virtual “water-cooler” conversations that the amateurs are having every day, all over the world…

While I’m not sure what Jon was getting at in his answer exactly, I suspect that it means there are people reviewing wine publicly who have neither the experience or background to make determinations on its quality in comparison to the greatest wines in the world. And on that point, he’d be right. I can tell you firsthand that the man knows his shiz, is sharper than a tack, and isn’t afraid to voice (and defend) a well-considered opinion – all traits that make me deeply admire his work.

But if I’m right about the reasoning behind the view he expressed to IntoWine, then I can safely conclude that the view is skewed, in that it ignores a fact that is fundamental to how wine information is being consumed today: nearly everyone who buys wine and decides to talk about it in their social circles is now an amateur wine critic to some extent.

This is not new news – in Internet terms, which are more akin to the rapid aging of dog years (and even then, those are parallax dog years, in accelerated speed-of-light terms compared with the orbiting-close-to-the-black-hole-event-horizon off-line world), it’s a bit of ancient history; studies that demonstrate the power of en masse customer reviews have been with us for years; and it’s not as if the pace of the Internet has slowed (or become less of a popular draw) since then. That wine should be somehow immune to the same forces of customers easily sharing their opinions on-line is, simply, insane-asylum-strait-jacket crazy.

This isn’t to say that the role of critics isn’t important – it is, precisely so that the barometer can be set for how wine’s compare across the entire quality spectrum, from the banal to the truly sublime; and not only across the less-experienced spectrum of each consumer’s taste-buds. But that doesn’t make those consumers’ taste buds somehow irrelevant – in fact, within immediate social circles, those consumers’ taste buds might not only be relevant, they might be the only taste buds that matter when it comes to wine recommendations, period.

So what’s a (professional) critic to do when everyone is a(n amateur) wine critic?

The answer, I think, is simple: help the amateur critics.

Professional wine critics now serve at the pleasure of the audiences who give them the honor – and humbling responsibility – of following their advice. Critics must therefore serve their audience above all else – and if separate conversations are being had when it comes to wine, then it seems to me that one of the critics duties in this now-not-so-new world is to help bridge the gap between those conversations, amateur and professional.

In other words, join the (lively, exciting, and engaging) amateur conversations, and invite the amateurs to join in theirs. Social media tools make this very, very easy to do – but that’s another topic entirely, and I’m already thirsty…

So for now, let’s just leave it at this: Don’t let anyone tell you that you’re not adding to the wine conversation – because you are the conversation; and no matter what knowledge level of conversation you’re having, rest assured that your voice now matters, and matters more than it ever has!

Cheers!

Why Every Wine Lover Should Have A Wine Blog

1WineDude — Mon, 08 Aug 2011 12:00:00 +0000

If you love wine, you can do something that costs $0.00 and almost certainly will up your wine appreciation and wine tasting I.Q. score varios puntos. Namely, start a wine blog.

Right now. It will take you less than ten minutes. Go to wordpress.com and create a blog, and your first post can be as simple as “hey, I really think I dig wine, and I want to talk about it.”

You shouldn’t expect anyone to read it yet, but that’s not the point. The point is to journal your own personal journey with wine.

I can feel the collective groan of WineSpectator.com forum members, other wine bloggers, and print media at the suggestion that every Tom, Dick, Harry, Sally, and Bacchus start churning out their own personal impressions on the wines that they try and how it affects their lives.

And I’m here today to tell those people to go shove it.

Start a wine blog, and piss all of them off. Do it because it will help you learn about wine, because it will help you share some of your wine experiences with your friends, because it will encourage you to taste more and more wine and get to know your own wine preferences better.

But most of all, do it because it’s good for the wine industry if you start blogging about wine, because the positives of every additional ounce added to the volume of the current wine media sea change far, far outweigh the potential negatives. More on that in a minute.

You will hear from many that you shouldn’t, of course, for a large variety of reasons. So let’s just call bullsh*t on just about every one of the reasons right now…

You shouldn’t blog about wine because you can’t write well, or you don’t know enough about wine, or no one who doesn’t know you will care about what you write. But that assumes that your aim is to court an audience of wine consumers instead of just wanting to share, learn and grow; it assumes that you want to compete with the best wine blogs in the world, or that you have aims to single-handedly topple The Wine Advocates of the world. You don’t – you just want to talk about wine. So that argument holds about as much weight as saying that I shouldn’t play roller hockey with my buddies because I’m not good enough to have tried out for the Philadelphia Bulldogs – in other words, it’s bullsh*t.

You shouldn’t blog about wine because you’re blog will contribute to the undermining of the “real” or “legitimate” wine press in America. Again… you can safely call bullsh*t on that one. While it could be argued that you’re diluting the pool by (sort of) jumping into the wine media waters, your contribution is infinitesimally small compared to the dilution that the wine writing genre has brought upon its own head from years of churning out content so formulaic and predictably banal that it has effectively adopted an outsourced business model. You can tell anyone who gives you that angle to go pound sandy soil in some Hungarian vineyards.

You shouldn’t blog about wine because wine bloggers have a terrible reputation as wanna-be critics who whore themselves out for free wine samples. Buuuullshiiiiiizzzzz. There are for sure a group of posers in the wine blogging world, people with limited ability who are pretending to matter, act as though they are bigger than their audience, and demand free stuff. Of course, that same group exists in on-line and printed versions of all media, no matter what the topic. But their presence, volume, and influence is largely overplayed; they make up a tiny fraction of the wine blogging community. And just ask any of several hundred wine bloggers who talk about vino just for the love of it – you will NOT get freebies or samples unless you have cultivated an audience that wine PR people want to reach for their clients. An undue amount of attention is paid to the exceptions, but riddle me this, Batman: is it more likely there are stories made about the posers because they rule the roost, or is it more likely that the folks covering than angle are doing so because it’s the most sensationalized spin that they could put on it?

You shouldn’t blog about wine because it will add to the confusion about wine already rampant among consumers; helpless, the poor consumer won’t know which way to turn, won’t know who they can trust about wine, and their heads will explode messily in supermarket wine aisles nationwide. [ Insert sign-language sign for bullsh*t here. ] You’re a wine consumer – do you consider yourself an idiot? I certainly don’t consider you an idiot. If a wine consumer out there can’t tell the difference between GoodGrape.com, or PalatePress.com and some poser site looking for free handouts, or if they can’t sort through the fact that someone blogging just for the fun of it has a different aim entirely than AnotherWineBlog.com, then those people deserve to drink crappy wine because they either aren’t paying attention or they don’t have all the right synapses firing. The “muddies the waters” argument is demeaning – it’s telling you that (poor, poor, pitiful you), you just don’t know any better; and that, my friends, is bull honkey.

The fact is, you can start a wine blog, you can do it in a few minutes, without any prequalification in the wine biz, and nobody can stop you. The gatekeepers should really just suck it up and stop trying to deter you, because it’s ultimately better for them (oh, the irony!) and the entire wine industry if you blog about wine, and if you do it for the love of it and without pretense, and without any sense of entitlement. Blog your vinous-lovin’ heart out, and don’t sweat the rest of it. If you do happen to attract an audience, then the game changes significantly: you then owe it to yourself, your readers and the entire wine industry to continually improve your tasting, writing, and reporting skills (not to mention increasing your overall wine knowledge). But that day may never come, and that’s okay because it’s not your aim. Blog about wine for you. And maybe for a few of your friends who will read you and dig what you have to say about wine.

You may not realize it at first, but your small wine blog audience, added in aggregate to the audiences of many, many, many, many other consumers blogging about wine, adds up to something big – something very, very big – that is fundamentally morphing the wine media world. I offer this tidbit from Jancis Robinson’s keynote speech at the 2011 Wine Bloggers Conference, as reported by (talented blogger and fine writer) David McIntyre at WashingtonPost.com:

Robinson seemed genuinely excited when she spoke of the changes brought on by new media. With consumers no longer dependent on one or two magazines for advice, and with more and more-varied wines available to choose from, the market is being transformed, she said. “Retailers will regain the right to make their own choices of what to sell instead of following the one or two voices, and my own dream of consumers making up their own minds about what they like to drink will finally come true,” Robinson said. “Develop your own opinions and get in touch with your own preferences. Remember that with wine appreciation, there are no rights and no wrongs. We all have different tastes, and no single one of them is right. Be open: There are other grape varieties than chardonnay, and there are other colors of wine than red.”

I love Jancis’ dream. And I think it’s attainable, though on some days it may seem a bit distant. Which wine world would you rather inhabit – the one in which a handful of critics make or break wine brands within narrow definitions of what constitutes “good” or “bad” wine (f*ck, it sounds like an Orwellian vision of wine Communism!), or the open-minded, multifaceted one that Jancis talked about at WBC11? That’s a hypothetical question, by the way…

So here’s a toast in anticipation that you’re wine blog will help, just a little bit, in bringing that dream to life.

Cheers!

Get Yer Vote On! (Pick The Winners For The 2011 Wine Blog Awards)

1WineDude — Fri, 24 Jun 2011 13:00:53 +0000

The judges hath spoken, and the list of finalists are IN for the 2011 Wine Blog Awards!

I’ll skip the preamble about the awards and their background, since you can read all about that at the WBA website, and last time I checked all of you could read. The important thing is that the 2011 WBAs are now in their public voting period (sounds serious, doesn’t it? like the stages of a parasitic infection or something…), which will run through this Monday (June 27), with winners being announced on July 23, 2011 at the North American Wine Bloggers Conference.

Which means that YOU can rawk the vote and help decide who is “WINNING” (wine-ing?) in the blog-o-world! Get yer wine bloggin’ vote on at http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/CNTK5P8.

1WineDude.com is included this year as a finalist in the Best Overall Wine Blog category. It happens to be up against some (very) stiff competition, which I suppose is the highest form of compliment that could be paid to a lil’ ol’ blog like mine: PR maven and wine shipping good-fighter Tom Wark’s Fermentation, my wine blogging consigliere & Forbes.com writer Jeff Lefevere’s Good Grape, CellarTracker.com über-reviewer Richard Jennings’ RJ on Wine, and the personal blog of Wine Enthusiast’s Steve Heimoff. Great sites all, though the lineup certainly screams “single-contributor white guy club” this year.

Now this is supposed to be the part where I tell you how humbling it is to be named a finalist. And it is genuinely humbling. But I’m not gonna tell you that I don’t enjoy winning as much as the next guy/gal/hermaphrodite, because I do, and I have a (playfully) competitive streak, so saying that I wouldn’t be thrilled to win the award again would be disingenuous. BUT…

As corny as it sounds I am honestly quite jazzed just at being named a finalist, because while I’ve been told by others that the nomination felt like a “given,” I can assure you that there’s been far more change “under the covers” at 1WD than one might guess from a quick naked-eye glance across these virtual pages, and it certainly never felt like a “given” to me…

I’ve tried to continually up the value provided by this site over the last twelve months, and expand (and formalize) the scope of its ~~drivel~~ er… content. In a lot of ways, the time between last year’s WBAs and this year’s has been a period of serious rebuilding here, with a lot more focus given to the what/how/why and general craft of wine reviews, adding podcasts, upping the quality of the vids, all the while working harder than I’d ever had imagined at trying to strike the right balance between shooting from the hip without shooting too much from the hip. In other words, I’ve worked my wine-blogging-ass off this past year.

So to me there are two ways of looking at this year’s WBA nom: either 1) that hard work has paid off to some extent, or 2) things have gotten stagnant enough around the wine blog-o-world to harbor egg-laying mosquitoes.

The evidence from my vantage point – and I’d argue that I’ve got a pretty decent view of the wine blog-o-world from where I’m sitting – suggests that the #2 option above holds less water than a dry-farmed old vine Malbec grape left out to raisin in the sun. Where others see stagnation in wine blogging, I see maturation. The wine blogosphere remains as vibrant as ever, and while the space for generalist wine blogs has been largely taken up by the likes of blogs like yours truly, the opportunity for passionate, geeky, niche wine blogs to make an impact is higher than ever before. I think we’ll see more niche blogs make an impact in this space sooner than many might otherwise suspect.

In any case, regarding those that visit this here corner of the Internet: whoever you are, and for whatever reason you happen to be here reading 1WD, I sincerely THANK YOU for your energy and engagement (and, of course, falettinme be mice elf agin) – and I hope to hear your ideas for how to make 1WD even better. 1WD wouldn’t get nominated for jack sh*t without your support, and as I’ve said before I’ll take your engagement over awards any day of the week.

Regarding the WBAs: If you’re inclined to vote for me, then thank you (again), you RAWK and I bask in the glow of your perpetual awesomeness, uncanny wit, and good looks! If not voting for me, then I do sincerely hope that you’re at least inclined to vote anyway, to help give some of that crucial support and engagement to your favorite altrnative wine coverage.

The full list of 2011 WBA finalists in each category are below (congrats to all – you go, achievers! “and proud we are of all of them!”).

Now stop reading, get pouring, and get voting!

Cheers!

Best New Blog

Best Writing

Best Winery Blog

Best Single Subject

Best Wine Reviews

Best Industry Blog

Best Graphics, Photography, Presentation

Best Overall Wine Blog

Born Digital: Some Of Our Children Are Ugly (What Wine Writing Awards Mean)

1WineDude — Wed, 15 Jun 2011 13:00:00 +0000

The ugly child to which I refer in the title being me, of course. Hey, even in the on-line wine writing world, not all of those who are “born digital” can be handsome, I’m afraid.

I recently (ok, somewhat recently – times are busy, people!) ”took the bronze” in the 2010 Born Digital Wine Awards, in which a story I wrote on the wines of Greek isle of Santorini (Endangered Species: Santorini Wine Fights for Its Survival) was chosen as a finalist in the Wine Tourism category (somewhat ironically I suppose, since one could make an argument that it’s an anti-tourism piece). This got me a gift certificate to Amazon.com, and a nod from Jancis Robinson (as well as a subscription to her Purple Pages, which I’m looking forward to viewing once I get thirty or more uninterrupted seconds to myself, probably sometime in early October at the rate things are going now).

That, along with some kind nominations for the 2011 Wine Blog Awards (big THANKS to those who nominated me, by the way!), have put wine writing awards front-and-center in my mind lately. As in, re-pondering what wine writing awards really mean, man. And what I’ve learned through all of the re-pondering is that I’m not sure what they really mean (but, as usual, that won’t stop me from talking about them!)…

Awards are differentiators

Search on the term “wine blog” on Google and you will receive “about 16,300,000 results.” How any reasonable wine lover who isn’t completely obsessed by the subject is supposed to make heads or tails (or hearts) distilling that brew of content is beyond me. Awards help to differentiate the (potentially) meaningful form the (potentially) banal, but like any accolades need to be taken as potential guideposts because…

Awards are only as good as the competition (and process)

It’s tough to know which awards carry the most prestige, or have the stiffest competition, or the most worthwhile judges; and in that respect, wine blog / writing awards are no different than medals given to wines in competitions, in that there’s no easy place for the wine-writing-consumer to go to know which bouts are the equivalent of the World Cup, and which are more like pre-qualifying “friendly matches.”

And even then if all aspects of the awards process are top-notch (judges, the vetting process – which for nearly all on-line wine awards is still too opaque for the interested to get a sense of how fair they truly are – and the quality of the competing authors/articles), there’s no guaranteeing that the winners will be your cup of vino. It’s important to note that awards themselves may judge things that you find unimportant – and I think it can be argued (quite strongly) that many awards reward the status quo, which to me can be a dangerous thing because wine writing of the last several years can tend towards the (extremely) banal. I’m reminded of a discussion that took place earlier this year on Charlie Olken’s blog about the future of wine blogging – in it, my recent traveling companion Mike Dunne noted in the comments that “quick-hit and risk-adverse editors are as responsible for wine journalism’s low standing today more than blogs.” And I think he’s onto an important point there: not only is there poor and/or uninteresting writing about wine everywhere, we have today a scenario in which poor and/or uninteresting writing about wine is rewarded monetarily, not surprisingly at decreasing rates – because once you make a formulaic model the accepted mainstream, it becomes low-hanging fruit for an outsourced resourcing model (in this case, outsourcing to writers who are willing to work for very little money). Pay peanuts, and you get monkeys as we used to say in InfoTech. If an awards program reinforces that model, then is it really worth a hill of beans to those who want wine writing (hell, any writing for that matter) to be unique, interesting, and emotionally engaging?

Having said all of that, we’re assuming here that wine writing awards generally are important, which I think is a valid assumption, but only in so much as we remember that…

Awards don’t mean as much as drive, appeal, and (especially) engagement

Awards make me feel good, and no doubt have opened doors to other exciting opportunities for me, and so I’m (very) grateful that I’ve been fortunate enough to have won a few of them. They differentiate me, and allow me to use the term “award-winning” which, I freely admit, feels cool in a “defending Superbowl champion…” kind of way. The validation also keeps me from hanging up my wine bloggin’ spurs when I hit the low points in the darkest hours that (I think, anyway) most writers find themselves groping blindly through at least once in a while (and in the case of wine writers, the lows are probably deepened from time-to-time by the depressive effects of over-doing the alcohol consumption): Does what I’m doing really matter to people?

But I’d trade all of them – even the awards that involved popular voting, which to me helps to serve as validation that you are, in fact, resonating with readers – for a consistent answer to that darkest-hours question. For example, I’d sleep a hell of a lot better at night if I earned myself one quarter of the drive, passion, appeal and engagement of someone like Gary Vaynerchuk; say what you will about the guy but you cannot simultaneously claim to be reasonably and also deny that he’s galvanized thousands of people around the topic of vino, many of whom may never had otherwise paid a lick of attention to wine in the first place. Now that’s relevant engagement, people – and it’s its own reward.

I’m not saying I crave fame, I’m saying that I crave quality engagement with people over the topic of wine, the kind of engagement that gets people talking, taking action, and causes me to see things in new and interesting ways – on its very best days, that can happen on 1WD and to me it’s as soul-fulfilling as any well-aged Mosel Riesling (long-time readers will understand just how strong of a statement that one is for me to make!).

In other words, if you’re blogging about wine and finding yourself uptight about something like the WBAs, you need to have a glass of lightly-chilled rosé and then get lightly-chilled yourself. It’s not that they are bereft of meaning – they’re not; but they probably don’t have anywhere near the significance to your life as you might think they would when seeing the shiny badges that winners can post to their sites. Why? Because if you’re really resonating with people, and enjoying the ride yourself, then you’ve really no need for benefits (or the potential crutch) of awards.

Cheers!

Wine Blog Awards 2011: Nominate For Good Karma

1WineDude — Fri, 27 May 2011 13:00:00 +0000

Ok, I cannot, as the title suggests, guarantee the receipt of good karma if you participate in the nomination process for the 2011 Wine Blog Awards. As I understand those things, only Deepak Chopra has the power to do that. But nominating might make you feel good, both in terms of having your voice heard and in supporting your fave on-line wine writers.

2011 marks the 5th year of the awards, and while they’ve grown-up quite a bit, the overall power-to-the-people process has remained fairly consistent: you (yes, that’s you) go to wineblogawards.org and nominate which wine blogs you’d like to see considered as finalists in each of eight categories (Best Wine Blog Graphics, Photography, & Presentation; Best Industry/Business Wine Blog; Best Wine Reviews on a Wine Blog; Best Single Subject Wine Blog; Best Winery Blog; Best Writing On a Wine Blog; Best New Wine Blog; and Best Overall Wine Blog). Judges will vet the nominations and announce a list of finalists in each category on or about June 20, after which the public can vote to determine the winners.

I had the honor and quite humbling experience of winning the award in the Best Overall Wine Blog category last year, so I feel a sort of ambassador-like obligation to return the good karma and encourage you to nominate your fave wine blogs today (nominations close May 31, so hurry the hell up already!). Somebody get Deepak on the phone please, I’m having a moment here, people!…

Last year, in a hastily-executed acceptance speech at the 2010 Wine Bloggers Conference, I said that I hoped I didn’t win the award again, because I wanted to see the wine blogging world do better than have 1WD as one of its figureheads – there’s just too much talent out in wine blog-o-land. Just my poor-man’s way of “challenging” the wine blog community to keep raising its collective game, I suppose, and continue to prove its mettle against the best wine coverage in print or any other media. I think we’ve seen the wine blog world rise admirably to that challenge so far in 2011, which makes me excited for the great content that the rest of the year will bring us.

Now… to help offset the heaviness and love-fest of the preceding paragraphs, I offer you this NSFW but light-hearted video interview I did post-awards-ceremony at the 2010 Wine Bloggers Conference in Walla Walla, WA (with special guest appearance by drinknectar.com‘s Josh Wade:

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Now stop watching and go nominate some blogs, stat!

Cheers!