April Fool’s 2022 wine post

This time, reality is more bizarre than anything the WC could make up for April Fool’s

I was thinking about reviving the blog’s April Fool’s tradition this year, but before I could write a post, I saw this:

“I don’t want to point fingers at anyone else’s business in particular, but people don’t know what’s happening behind the scenes of so many wine criticism publications, unless you’re in the business, and then you are like, ‘oh my God.’ ”

That is from Lisa Perroti-Brown MW, the former editor of the Wine Advocate. She has started a new wine magazine called The Wine Independent because, “Oh, my God,” none of the others are.

The wine world may be collapsing around us – to say nothing of what’s happening in the larger world – and we’re going to get yet another wine magazine aimed at old white guys because none of the rest are objective.

Talk about April Fool’s.

The Winestream Media mostly reported the news of this with a straight face, and I’ve resisted the impulse to say anything about people in glass houses. Or to note that, yes, wine drinkers do know what she’s talking about. As one of the blog’s readers has pointed out, “No one is paying [the WC] for favorable press.”

Rather, what’s so bizarre about the move is that someone (or several someones) is investing millions of dollars in a wine magazine at a time when interest in wine may be at a 40-year low.

This speaks to wine’s inability to notice what’s going on around it, something I’ve had to write about so many times that it’s depressing that I have to do it again. Or, as I’ve joked — also too many times: The wine business will keep selling expensive wine to the Baby Boomers until the last one is dead, and only then will someone ask, “Hey … what happened to all the wine drinkers?”

So here are the six April Fool’s wine posts; as clever as they are, I’m not sure any is as clever as the launch of The Wine Independent:
• Wine Curmudgeon will sell blog to Wine Spectator
• Big Wine to become one company
• Wine Spectator: If you can’t buy it, we won’t review it
• Supreme Court: Regulate wine writing through three-tier system
• Gov. Perry to California: Bring your wineries to Texas
• California secedes from U.S. — becomes its own wine country