The Wine Curmudgeon’s favorite posts of 2021

These eight posts weren’t necessarily the most popular, but they were among my favorite posts of 2021

Welcome to the Wine Curmudgeon’s seventh annual year-end top 10 list, which is not about the most read posts. Or necessarily has 10 items. Would you expect either here?

Instead, these are the posts that I enjoyed writing, thought were important to write, or both. Why not a best read list? That’s because, on the old blog, Google determined that, and the various Barefoot posts were always the most read. Which, frankly, was kind of depressing.

Here, then, in no particular order, are my favorite posts of 2021:

• “Saturday Night Live” takes on wine marketing, with an almost scary parody of selling high-end Champagne. Why scary? Because, as our exhaustive critique of wine marketing has shown, the real thing is often a parody of itself, which the SNL sketch understands perfectly.

• The Bad Spaniels dog toy post, an incisive look at wine criticism, including a video of Churro, the blog’s associate editor, playing with the dog toy. I know some of you might not care about my take (yet again) on the failings of wine criticism, but how could you pass up a cute dog playing with a toy?

• Yes, we were drinking less during the pandemic. All the numbers were there, from a third-party study of alcohol consumption during the pandemic. And we weren’t all falling down drunk. And no one paid the least attention save for a handful of blog readers. I realize I’m just one small voice in the babble that is the Internet, but it would have been nice if someone at a Mainstream news media outlet had seen this and had written about it — even if only to make fun of me.

• The young people. wine, and cooking shows posts. The Baby Boomers learned about wine through cooking shows, but the Gen X and Millennial cooking shows don’t feature wine. Hence, one more reason why younger consumers aren’t interested in wine. How do I know this mattered? Because several really smart people who know wine and the media told me so after reading them.

• The Worf and premiumization wine parody. The video parodies have rarely done well over the blog’s history; I’ve never been able to figure out why. I write them, despite the effort required, because I enjoy doing it. And this one is funny — Star Trek’s Worf talking about wine prices and his honor.

• The Ernest Hemingway wine post. Those of us who learned to write in the 1970s grew up on Hemingway, so this year’s PBS documentary about his life was an opportunity to look at Hemingway and wine (as well as his alcoholism). There is even a not so veiled criticism of wine writing in The Sun Also Rises.”

More of the WC’s favorite posts:
• Favorite posts of 2020
• Favorite posts of 2019
• Favorite posts of 2018