These nine posts weren’t necessarily the most popular in the blog’s history, but they were among the best and most important
This is the second of two parts looking at some of the best posts that appeared during the blog’s 16-year history. Today, the best of the best. Part I: The posts no one appreciated, even though they should have.
Picking the best posts I wrote over the blog’s past 16 years and 4,700 entries was much more difficult than I thought it would be. Chalk that up to lots of quality content, right?
Or just a bad memory.
Nevertheless, these nine posts were among the best — as well as some of the most important, offering a perspective rarely found elsewhere and about as far from toasty and oaky as wine writing gets.
In no particular order:
• Wine writing accreditation. Yes, only people with “credentials” should be allowed to write about wine. You can imagine how I felt about that proposal. This 2011 post was one of the most popular in blog history; in those days, I could have written about wine writing every week and made myself a star.
• The red wine bias study, in which Neal Chaudhary and I showed — using math, even — that the Winestream Media and its 100-point scoring system favored red wine over white, regardless of quality.
• Convenience store wine. Yes, people buy wine at convenience stores. Shocking, isn’t it?
• Cooking shows and wine’s fall from grace. The Baby Boomers’ cooking shows — Julia Child, et al — featured wine with their recipes. Today’s video chefs — Alison Roman, Frankie Celenza, and so forth — rarely do. As I wrote: “Hence, the youngest generations have never learned that wine is just as much a part of dinner as plates and letting the pots soak.”
• Arty, the first AI wine writer. Quite brilliant, actually, foreshadowing the uproar over artificial intelligence five years before it happened — and quite funny, too.
• Welcome back, restaurants. This post spurred one of the most important members of the Winestream Media to write a not-so-nice rebuttal, taking me to task for suggesting that restaurants lower prices, offer BYOB, and write more interesting lists to lure diners back after the pandemic. How dare I?
• Cheap wine vs. wine made cheaply made. This concept plagued the blog for years, since most people assumed they were the same thing. I never really understood it until New Orleans’ Tim McNally explained it to me in 2014. So I wrote that cheap wine should be more than “Two Jack in the Box tacos for 99 cents. … [which] are both cheap and a value, but why would you eat them unless it’s 2 a.m. and you’ve been drinking all night?” Because the best cheap wine is more than fast food, as I like to think we’ve shown over the years.
• Ingredient labels. We’ve almost won this one — the first labels should appear in the next 18 months or so. The first mention of ingredient labels on the blog came in 2008, about six months into its existence.
• Iran and the neo-Prohibitionists. Want to know what Prohibition is like? Look to Iran, where alcoholism is rampant and there are AA chapters — even though booze is illegal and you can be flogged if you drink it. Ask the next Neo you meet if that’s what they have in mind.