Wine Writers
I would like to write about wine in a way that provokes thought without provoking people, and I would like to read wine writers who have the passion and intellectual clarity, and curiosity, to do the same.
Doug Wregg, Les Caves de Pyrene
According to Professor X (that is actually the name of the author), in his book In the Basement of the Ivory Tower, the two crucial ingredients in the mysterious mix that creates a good writer are: (1) having read enough throughout a lifetime to have internalized the rhythms of the written word, and (2) refining one’s ability to mimic those rhythms. Extending his pronouncement from writing in general to writing about wine in particular, the two crucial ingredients in the mysterious mix that makes up a good wine writer may be: (1) having tasted enough wine throughout one’s lifetime and read about wine extensively enough to have internalized the rhythms of both wine itself and wine writing, and (2) refining the ability to mimic those rhythms in one’s writings.
Matt Kramer has suggested wine experts have to pay attention to two distinct elements when writing about wine: 1) knowledge of wine, and 2) knowledge of writing. The first element that is necessary for writing well about wine is developing the tasting skills and experiences to focus one’s attention on the wine in the glass. To do so requires wine writers to refine their tasting palate, to increase their ability to record detailed notes about the process of tasting, to develop an intimate understanding of one’s immediate sensations and tasting experiences, and to acquire an extensive knowledge of the wine world in general. The second element is developing the communication and writing skills to share these varied experiences in a way that is not off-putting. To put it simply, highly successful wine writers need to be able to investigate wine like Sherlock Holmes and write like Shakespeare.
In Decanter magazine, Charles Jennings has offered his take on the process of writing about wine:
1) It involves acquiring a huge amount of arcane additional knowledge, the equivalent of a wine study book combined with a car repair manual, and
2) Becoming comfortable with the new diction that goes with this arcane knowledge, thewinespeakthat shows you’re serious.
Jennings goes on to suggest the reason why people write in esoteric and absurd ways is that the number of descriptors available for wine appreciation is pretty small, so wine buffs press unfamiliar, sometimes unintelligible, words and images into service just so they don’t bore themselves. Essentially, Jennings believes the experience of drinking wine primarily exists in the drinker’s own particular personal universe. From a linguistic perspective, writing about wine is as much a language game as it is a process of rendering factual, objective knowledge about what the writer experiences.
In a speech addressing the European Wine Bloggers Conference in 2012, Andrew Jefford declared the death of the wine writer. In this speech, he alluded to the increasing dominance of online wine writing and how these platforms were affecting the status and impact of traditional paper-based wine columnists. It is with a sense of irony that Jeffords declares the death of the wine writer while simultaneously acknowledging the rapid increase in the amount of writing about wine. Possibly, his comments are more about the imminent death of a particular style of wine writing that is being published. Rather than address the quantity of writing or the increasing number of writers writing about wine available today, Jeffords stakes out the moral high ground by declaring the old ways of writing about wine are being set aside for new genres, platforms, and audiences for wine writing.
One of the most visible laments of traditional wine writers these days is that in the digital age anyone can set up a blog or website and start posting tasting notes, commentaries, and reviews that were once the purview of highly-qualified columnists working, that were selected and hired to write about wine in the most prominent trade publications. George Taber, the reporter who covered The Judgment of Paris tasting, in which a California wines (Chateau Montelena Chardonnay and Stag’s Leap Cabernet Sauvignon) first beat France in a wine tête-à-tête blind testing, is skeptical of wine writers in general, stating, “wine critics want to be Zeus on a mountaintop.” He laments the power of wine critics and writers and the snobbery that is often associated with their elite positions.
Some websites have attained prominence in their respective fields by crowd-sourcing critical reviews of products, for example movie reviews from Rotten Tomatoes, restaurant reviews posted on Open Table, or product reviews posted on Amazon. Vivino has created the world’s largest data base of wine information and reviews by allowing the normal, everyday wine drinker to rate wines on a five-point scale and offer comments about any wine they wish. Whether these crowd-sourced reviews written by common-folk are more helpful than those reviews written by professional critics has been hotly contested. I believe the reviews of both groups should be taken with a proverbial grain of salt.
It has also been suggested that wine writers, especially those reviewing specific wines and wine regions, provide an important service. It has been asserted that wine drinkers benefit from critics that are able to review wines and wine-related accoutrements that they might not be able experience for themselves. Whether it’s a new movie about wine, a recently opened wine bar, or the newest vintage from Bordeaux, one cannot possibly experience all the things firsthand that we want to know more about. By making suggestions, and wine reviews should only be taken as suggestions, critics let us know about the wines they believe to be more valuable and worthwhile.
In the Oxford Companion to Wine, Jancis Robinson defined wine writing as a parasitical activity founded on the backs of wine makers. In essence, Robinson was pointing out that wine critics, experts, and sommeliers don’t actually make anything, they just evaluate the work and the lives of others. If this is true, I guess what I am doing, writing about wine writing, is a third-tier parasitical activity. A lamprey on the backs of wine writers, who in turn are sucking off the life-blood of the hard-working men and women that grow grapes and turn them into wine.
However pernicious this activity may be, critics have continued to thrive for centuries on the backs of artisans and creative people. If someone is producing something of value, someone is readily available to judge it and make comments about the quality of the thing being produced. From cheese, cigars, whisky, paintings, music, and literature to the wines in our glasses, people are more than willing to share their opinions about the creative activities of other peoples. Critics live off the creations of others and live to judge and to talk about these creations and formulate a distinct discourse in the process. A discourse of wine, in this instance.
Wine writers these days have many more options for distributing their reviews and opinions on wine, regardless of whether the language they use in these reviews is arcane or abstract. It is hard to argue that the amount of information available on wine and wine-related items dwarfs the amount of information available in the pre-Internet eras. On a blog entitled Les Caves de Pyrene, the author Doug Wregg, is concerned that everyone has become a self-appointed wine critic, and that writing about wine has become an end in itself rather than an intellectually provocative or emotionally engaging activity. The goal of the wine writer should be to simplify terminology without simplifying the complexity of wine and write things that benefit wine drinkers. Andrew Jeffords asserted:
“It’s easy to use a received language of wine and assume that it has universal meaning. It doesn’t. The language of wine is, of necessity, highly metaphorical and hence puzzling: these are not plain words. That language needs constant reworking in order to keep meaning fresh. At the same time, a strenuous search for freshness can easily teeter over into the ridiculous, because of metaphorical overload. Every wine writer should not just think about wine with passionate intensity, but about language too.”
Tim Gaiser, a Master Sommelier with whom I had the pleasure of participating in two days of wine tasting and wine seminars, thinks wine writing serves a purpose and will be around regardless of the number of critics that attack the profession. He writes,
“as much as the critics of the wine critics rail about wine writing, the landscape will remain much the same. Even if a ‘code of wine writing conduct’ is written, there will always be renegades… whose prose defies any and all rules. Wine is not precise. We will never completely agree on how it should be described much less written about. I think that’s a good thing.”
I agree with Gaiser that disagreements may be a good thing. Trying to use scientific instruments to objectively identify tastes of a particular wine without human involvement seems antithetical to the goal of making, sharing, and enjoying wine. In our desire for accuracy and scientific predictability, we may assassinate many of the elements of wine tasting and enjoyment we are trying to measure and evaluate. To move forward, let’s take a quick step back and take a look at some of the historical forerunners that have led us to where we are today in the world of wine writing.
History of Wine Writing
Although Pliny the Elder has been credited with the quote, “In Vino Veritas” (in wine there is truth) written sometime in the 1st century, only a smattering of writing before the turn of the 20th century has been mentioned in direct connection to the modern wine writer. British author George Saintsbury is often cited as one of the early wine writers. His book, Notes on a Cellar, published in 1920 contained notes about aging wine and described wine in very general terms, often associating wine with differences in gender (masculine or feminine wines), or degrees of breeding (well-bred versus vulgar). Scholars who have studied wine writing have shown how cultural ideals of masculinity, class, and even physical fitness have influenced flavor descriptions in past decades.
Another important figure in wine writing and wine-making was Emile Peynaud, a wine researcher and Professor of Oenology at the University of Bordeaux, often credited with being the father of modern wine-making techniques. In his influential book, The Taste of Wine, written in 1983, Peynaud detailed the science and practices associated with wine tasting, the visual and sensory aspects of wines and wine tasting, tasting techniques, tasting vocabulary, and the art of drinking wine. In the introduction written by wine expert Michael Broadbent, Peynaud is described as intensely human, a patently patient man, a great teacher, an academic, and “an authority of immense stature who has the unusual ability to talk, and write, simply and directly.” Although these are lovely compliments, they seem to refer more to what a white man with high moral standards should have accomplished than anything explicit to wine writing. To be a good wine writer you need to be a good man with good morals and the rest will take care of itself.
Maynard Amerine and Edward Roessler published a wine manual in 1976 for the sensory evaluation of wines. Their goal was to be more explicit in the types of language used to describe wine components and experiences, shifting from vague terms to more precise language creating a more standardized set of wine-associated terms. Shortly after this publication in 1980, Ann Noble, a professor of oenology at the University of California, Davis created the Wine Aroma Wheel, a visual representation of the various smells and tastes one might experience in wines organized into categories of flavor references. The aroma wheel allowed more freedom for wine tasters to describe wine in concrete and literal terms, usually metaphorical in nature. The aroma wheel included descriptive categories that included spicy, tropical, woody, fruity, floral, earthy, and oxidized. It has been suggested the aroma wheel provided wine tasters with a new vocabulary to describe their experiences with wine. Could it also be that the wine wheel provided a standardized vocabulary signaled a particular way wine writers should talk and write about wine? Does the language describe experience it or construct it? This question is at the heart of the issues involved in developing a discourse of wine.
Harry Waugh, Michael Broadbent, Oz Clarke, Jancis Robinson, and Hugh Johnson are considered some of the most accomplished wine writers and critics of the modern era. These writers described themselves as wine critics and began writing for selected trade publications, including newspapers, magazines, and digitally based outlets. Lisa Perretti-Brown has suggested, as accomplished a set of wine writers these people are, it’s problematic to call them wine critics due to their close relationships in the wine industry. Perretti-Brown’s concern has been with critics’ direct or indirect interests in the sale of wine and their relationships with wine makers and distributors about which they write. I believe it is a justified concern.
Peretti-Brown, and many others, credits Robert Parker Jr. with being one of the most influential wine writers of the twentieth century and the father of modern wine criticism. Parker began his newsletter, The Wine Advocate, in the early 1970’s inspired by Ralph Nader to publish wine reviews that were not compromised by close ties to wine makers, producers, and distributors. His primary goal was to serve the interests of consumers by delivering high-quality, unbiased reviews of wines. Though he became, in many wine writers’ opinions, overly influential in the wine world, Parker worked hard throughout his career to draw a line between his relations wine makers and the audiences that read his publications. He asserted that his blinded wine tastings and reviews were objective, more scientific, and not biased by any relations with the wine industry.
In one of my favorite books about wine and drinking entitled Semiotics of Drink and Drinking by Paul Manning, the author takes a more academic perspective on wine than most of the wine writers I have discussed so far in this chapter. Writing from a semiotic perspective, he suggests aspects of connoisseurship mimics the paradigmatic model of standardized terminologies, involving an almost eucharistic reflexive moment in which the ability to recognize and deploy socially stratified denotational terms indexes a similar degree of social distinction in the wine drinker. This may take a few minutes and a dictionary to understand, but he is basically saying that how we talk about wine has as much to do with who we are and how we are perceived as it is about the wine in our glasses. Across the industry, wine writing runs the gamut from the commonsensical to the obtuse and obscure.
From a completely different, and much more informal, perspective, Marissa Ross, author of Wine. All the Time: The Casual Guide to Confident Drinking, views the current field of wine writers with a bit of disdain and contempt. She writes about the need for an unpretentious guide to wine, the prevalence of winesplaining by snobbish wine writers, and suggest the reason people hate wine and wine critics is the same reason they hated studying English in school. She compares blind tasting a wine to being called to the chalkboard to complete a math problem or being asked to read aloud on the spot in front of the class. I can only assume she has not read, nor would she enjoy, the book on semiotics and drinking.
Ross’ perspective aligns with recent declarations of the Death of Expertise, as millenials turn to crowd-sourcing rather than elitist wine critics for advice on what to drink. In similar fashion, wine blogs have been perceived as a way to democratize wine criticism and judgment, allowing more voices from underrepresented groups to be heard. But what if these new groups don’t know shit about wine?
To relegate all traditional wine writers to the trash heap of wine criticism seems to be throwing out the baby with the bath water. Two metaphors for the price of one! As a boomer, I am concerned with the whole “influencers” project, where celebrities have an undue influence on consumer behavior. Just because Kim Kardashian likes a certain wine, doesn’t make it worth drinking. All millenials aren’t well-informed and most traditional wine writers are worth considering.
Why Write About Wine?
I would like to consider wine writing from a more pragmatic perspective before concluding this discussion. Why do writers use certain types of language to describe wines? Is it an altruistic endeavor? Do wine writers simply want people to enjoy wine more thoroughly, or could it be something else? I would suggest that all this wine writing really has one goal, one primary objective that is more commercial than informative. Wine writing is done to sell more wine and to support a community of wine makers, distributors, producers, negociants, and retailers that make a living off these sales. The discourse community that has emerged around this topic must always remember that as much as wine is a cultural and historical product, it is something that is sold on the open market and is subjected to all the forces of free markets. This is not always a bad thing. I am a dyed-in-the-wool capitalist by heart, but it is important to remember there are financial and commercial aspects of wine that dictate much of the industry and the ways we talk and write about wine.
So What?
One of the biggest differences between reading a book and drinking a bottle of wine, is when the book is done, the reader can go back and read the book again. The wine drinker cannot go back and drink the same bottle again. They can drink a second bottle, but that may be a very different experience for a number of reasons. It is like the old saying, you cannot step into the same river twice. Once drank, the memory of the glass of wine is all that remains (and possibly the effects of alcohol on the drinker). This may be one reason the tasting and criticism of wine is so subjective, there is no residual entity others can go back and experiences again in the same exact way.
So, what exactly should we look for in a wine writer? Eric Asimov suggested we find someone that can help us as wine drinkers develop our knowledge of wine to make more informed choices. I believe we need writers that serve the consumer more than the wine industry. There should be a discernable difference between writing that is done for an advertisement and writing done for a critical review. The wine critic’s role is primarily to inform. These writing may help sell wine, but that should not be the essential purpose for writing. And yes, I know that sounds naïve. To end the continued expansion of wine snobbery, Marissa Ross believes we need to drink and share more wine, share knowledge freely and happily, encourage conversation rather than winesplaining. Basically, don’t be a dick and drink more wine. I can live with these suggestions.
How does one become a wine writer? According to many members of the online wine community, simply set up a blog, drink some wine, and get started writing. But is this a democratization of criticism, a crowd-sourcing of opinions, or a diluting of the quality of the wine writing available? Probably a bit of both. There are informative blogs and podcasts just as there are wine writers that know very little of which they speak and write. It is up to us as dedicated wine enthusiasts to decide which writers are worthy of our attention and thise that are better ignored.
Wine writers should view themselves as writers first, and wine experts, second. Although the two may seem inseparable, just drinking lots of wine isn’t enough, neither is just being a writer. The challenge Andrew Jeffords offers about wine writing is being fresh, without being ridiculous, being interesting without being pompous, and using language in ways that are exciting without being obtuse or unduly metaphorical. My suggestion is to read a variety of wine writers and wine reviews and find a writer you enjoy reading and use their words as a way of interacting with ideas rather than as an encyclopedia for discovering truth. Find a wine critic that has similar tastes and check out some the wines the recommend and see if these wines suit your tastes. It might just be that simple.