Birthday week essay 2023: It’s time to say goodbye

The blog will end in January after a successful and enjoyable 16-plus year run

In 1976, Billy Williams – a Hall of Famer and one of my favorite players – hit .211 for the Oakland Athletics in his final season in baseball. I was lucky enough to interview Billy once, and he told me hitting .211 in Oakland wasn’t much fun.

I don’t want to do a Billy Williams.

That’s why – unless something completely unexpected happens in the next several weeks – the blog will end its 16-plus year run on Jan. 15. I’ll post the $10 Hall of Fame and the Turner cheap wine award winner, as well as the rest of the January features, and that will be that. The Substack will go away (and Substack assures me that those with unexpired subscriptions will get refunds). But I will keep the old site and drop the paywall. Who knows? I might feel the need to write something every once in a while.

I did not come to this decision easily. I continue to enjoy writing the blog and I’d like to think its quality has not suffered over the years. I truly believe that it’s still sharp, witty, and offers honest information that wine drinkers can’t get anywhere else.

But, sadly, I don’t think it’s relevant anymore. And I’m not the kind of person to keep hitting myself in the head with a brick. In other words, batting .211 in Oakland.

Yes, irrelevance

Why not relevant?

• The wine business has decided that it wants to immolate itself at the altar of $20 wine, and nothing I have done seems to have changed that one bit. And God knows, I’ve tried.

• The neo-Prohibitionists are ever closer to turning moderate drinking into something as deadly and as addictive as cigarette smoking. The wine business, jonesing on premiumization, has ignored them, and nothing I’ve done seems to have changed that one bit. And God knows, I’ve tried.

• Young people mostly don’t care about wine, even though wine desperately needs young people. Nothing I have done seems to have changed that one bit. And God knows, I’ve tried.

The great irony about this? I talk to people every day, consumers and wine people alike, who agree with me. This summer, a wine marketer – out of the blue — told me the business badly needs quality wine costing $12 or less, and preferably from California. But, she said, she didn’t have high hopes of ever seeing any. A couple of weeks later, a leading wine writer who was going to speak at a big-time conference about wine’s future told me: “I am sure that the conference will have tons of good messages that the wine business will largely ignore.”

Not much to keep me going there, is it?

The switch to Substack 2 ½ years ago, though it paid me a living wage for the blog for the first time, didn’t help with relevance, either. I really shouldn’t have been surprised. The key to Substack is switching free subscribers to paid, but how do you switch someone who subscribes to 10, 20, or even 30 Substacks? And I have a lot of those kinds of free subscribers.

Besides, Substack works best for people who have a certain kind of celebrity, like Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, or who write about the “serious” subjects that appeal to the Substack demographic – politics, parenting, self-help, and, sadly, sports. A cranky ex-newspaperman who writes about wine is none of those.

Sigh — premiumization

And, in one more irony, moving to Substack was not unlike premiumizing the blog – and who hates premiumization more than I do?

So it’s time to move on. I will still freelance, since I have to make a living. But that won’t be quite the same thing as writing the blog. Yes, there were days when I ran around the house screaming and cursing, desperate to find something to write about the next day and having no idea what that would be. But that’s one of the joys of writing.

And I never missed a deadline, I never had to reprint anything to make those deadlines, and I never, ever made the blog about me. It was always about the readers and trying to help them find wine they would like – or to explain why they had so much difficulty finding wine they would like.

It’s impossible to describe the thrill of writing a piece that said something worthwhile and that said it in English so that everyone – and just not geeks and people with initials after the name – could understand it, could understand why wine is so much fun. Or helping someone find something new and terrific to enjoy. So, too, were the reader numbers on the old blog, to see that lots and lots of people read what I wrote and that I might be making a difference.

In those days, I think I did. Regional wine is now mostly accepted, and I had something to do with that — Drink Local! And I was writing about the fun of rose long before Instagram and Brangelina. Though, in yet another irony, rose – which should have been why young people took up wine — has been dumbed down or premiumized or both so that it’s just another $20 wine.

Which is not to say that the wine business paid me as much attention as it should have. I learned long ago that my message, though it resonated with consumers, was about the last thing the wine business wanted to hear. It’s not like there were a lot of “Highly recommended – Wine Curmudgeon” on those little tags hanging under bottles of wine on store shelves, were there? A common refrain: “What’s wrong with you – don’t you like expensive wine?” And when I would try to explain that most people can’t afford to drink expensive wine regularly, I’d get a look.

Sour grapes — hardly

I write this not as sour grapes, but to note that that it was part of doing business as the Wine Curmudgeon. If I had wanted to be noticed, I would have given every wine 93 points, accepted paid stories on the blog (“7 things to love about your favorite Big Wine supermarket brand!”), and done all of the cheerleading that most of the rest of the Winestream Media does.

But then the blog wouldn’t have been the blog. And what would have been the point of that?

Finally, the one thing that I will almost certainly not miss (besides the constant wrangling over availability): Free wine.

I can hear the amazed objections now: WC, how can you not want to get free wine?

Because most of the wine samples I get these days are supermarket plonk that may cost two or three times what they should cost and that tastes depressingly the same, regardless of varietal or appellation (especially for the reds). It’s so bad that I can tell other people what the wine will taste like before I open the bottle.

How much fun is that?

Because wine should be fun, and that’s perhaps the greatest sin the wine business has committed since I started the blog in November 2007. It has taken the fun out of wine.

And I just don’t have enough left to keep reminding them that’s why fewer and fewer people care about wine – and why fewer will care the more wine goes down this path.