“I don’t understand why no one appreciated my talents.”
Some posts worked out, but some — surprisingly — didn’t
This is the first of of two parts looking at some of the best posts that appeared during the blog’s 16-year history. Today, Part I: The posts no one appreciated, even though they should have. Part II: The most important posts in blog history.
I wrote almost 4,700 blog posts over the past 16 years, and the one thing I was never able to make sense of: Why some posts didn’t do well with readers.
I knew that the technical and business stories, the things that needed to be written, wouldn’t necessarily have a wide audience. Instead, it was the posts that should have garnered thousands and thousands of views, but never did.
Such as:
• Giving away money. I gave away Wine.com gift cards during Birthday Week on the old blog ($100 cards the last several years). But, even though the blog went to more than 1,500 people each day, I never got more than five or six dozen entries — and sometimes less. What did you have against free money?
• The film and TV parodies. The WC as Shaft? Bruce Lee kicking the crap out of wine judges who don’t respect Drink Local? And, most depressing, the Planet of the Apes takeoff, which had actual dialog (the great John Bratcher as Charlton Heston). I mentioned this to a friend, and she said, “Wine drinkers have no sense of humor.”
• Churro, the blog’s associate editor. The wine business complains that young people and Hispanics aren’t interested in wine. So I appoint my dog, a Chihuahua mix, as the blog’s associate editor and do a podcast with him, and no one got it. No one. Several people — and I’m not making this up — said, “He’s a dog.”
• The podcasts. Apple has an entire universe devoted to podcasts, so they must be popular with someone. But the blog’s interviews — usually with damned interesting people, often recommending quality cheap wine — never garnered much of an audience.
• Rose reviews, especially in the blog’s early days. I’d like to think my readers were past that old and stupid aphorism, “Friends don’t let friends drink pink.” You are, aren’t you?
This, the final edition, of Ask the WC: What to do after the blog ends
Because the customers always have questions, and the Wine Curmudgeon has answers.
Dear Jeff:
Is there anything we can do to get you to reconsider ending the blog? I understand your reasons, but there is an audience for what you do. Loyal reader
Dear Loyal:
Thank you for the kind words, but no, not really. I checked with some very smart people, and we considered a variety of ways to keep the blog going (including asking Churro, the blog’s associate editor, to take my place). But, in the end, there just seems to be little reason to write about quality, affordable wine when the wine business has very little interest in making any.
•
Say it ain’t so, WC:
Who do you suggest we read instead of you? Need suggestions
Dear Need:
My pal Dave McIntyre at the Washington Post is one of the best. Joe Roberts, the 1 Wine Dude, has the proper perspective on the wine business. And, perhaps surprisingly, there are still plenty of local newspaper types who write about the sorts of wines most of us drink..
•
Hey, Wine Curmudgeon:
Can’t believe you’re leaving. What will you miss the most? Gobsmacked
Dear Gobsmacked:
You, and the rest of the blog’s readers. Yes, I long ago tired of the arguments about availability, but other than that, you’re the reason I did this for so long. You love wine as much as I do, and you want to find something to drink that doesn’t taste like it came from an industrial spigot. How could I not appreciate that? And, though you didn’t ask, I won’t miss writing tasting notes. I’m almost giddy with the thought that I will never have to do it again.
What better way to get in the holiday spirit than with the Muppets? “Ode to Joy” indeed — more like Ode to Silliness. Which is a good thing.
Enjoy the holiday with the people who mean the most to you. The blog will return tomorrow with our regular features, including the annual Black Friday wine reviews.
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.
These seven posts weren’t necessarily the most popular, but they were among my favorite posts of 2023
We begin the blog’s 16th annual Birthday Week with the Wine Curmudgeon’s annual year-end top 10 list, which is not about the most read posts. Or necessarily has 10 items.
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.
Here, then, in no particular order, are my favorite posts of 2023:
• The Vintner Project’s plan to solve wine’s problems with $30 wine. As I wrote: “How in the world did anyone there think this story has any relationship with reality? We’re going to convert Bud Light drinkers to wine by suggesting they buy a $40 Nebiollo sparkling? Which, by the way, has one listing in Wine-Searcher.” And it brought in six new subscribers.
• No, ChatGPT isn’t the answer, either. I interviewed a chat AI about wine’s future, and the results were hardly impressive: “It also rambled, often talking about things that had nothing to do with the topic. It tied wine’s popularity with ‘typical millennial DIY generation creating fun experiences based on stuff lik macaroni boxes.’ ”
• The Frankie Celenza podcast. Which explained why young people don’t care for wine, and was mostly ignored by readers.
• More truth about Prohibition. I could probably write about Prohibition every week, given the subject’s popularity — as well as the efforts to bring it back.
• Decades and decades of wine books. Want to see what the Winestream Media was writing about 30 years ago? Or that the Wine Spectator once recommended $10 wine? Then check out this post.
“So much to ponder in the WC’s holiday blog schedule, yes?”
The 2024 $10 Hall of Fame and Turner Cheap Wine award are just six weeks away — and let’s not forget the cheap wine book makes a fine holiday gift
Once more, the WC is sifting through tasting notes, searching the wine database, and mulling over which wines will make the 2024 Hall of Fame — as well as the wine that will be named the 2024 Turner Cheap Wine of the Year winner. As always, your suggestions are welcome.
The blog’s schedule for the rest of the year includes:
• The blog’s 16th annual Birthday Week begins on Monday, with the WC’s annual state of the wine industry essay on Thursday.
• Thanksgiving wine ideas will post on Nov. 17, with the holiday gift guide on Nov. 27.
• Christmas and New Year’s wine suggestions on Dec. 21 and Dec. 28.
• The 2024 $10 Hall of Fame will make its 17th appearance on Jan. 12, with the 2023 Turner Cheap Wine of the Year posting the day before. As always, email me with suggestions or leave them in the comments. Eligibility rules are here. Keep in mind the wine should cost less than $12 or $13, should be generally available, and can’t be a private label sold exclusively by one retailer.
And, of course, how could it be a holiday season without a WC plug for the cheap wine book?
What happened after the WC told his new doctor that he – gasp – drank wine with dinner?
The WC had his annual physical the other day, but this was my third doctor in four years (thank you, U.S. health care system). And I was scared to death.
Not because I thought I was dying or in bad health or anything like that. Rather, I was terrified I would have to fight with my new doctor about drinking wine.
Which, given what I’ve heard from other wine writers, is where we find ourselves in the 2020s. Many in the medical community, regardless of the evidence, have decided that drinking is as deadly as cigarette smoking, and they aren’t shy about sharing that with their patients. One colleague told me that her physician was devastated – no exaggeration, she insisted — when he couldn’t find anything wrong with her liver.
So the conversation with my new doctor almost as soon as we started talking (because, of course, the WC doesn’t believe in wasting time):
“I’m a wine writer. I drink wine with dinner.”
“How many glasses?”
“2 ½.”
“Well, the guidelines say two glasses a day, so I guess you’re OK. Do you know what the Mediterranean diet is?”
At this point, I was speechless (which doesn’t happen all that often). Not only did my doctor not threaten me about drinking wine with dinner, but he treated me like an adult who takes responsibility for his health. My answer was almost blubbering: “Yes, Mediterranean diet — less red meat, more greens, beans, and grains, and olive oil.”
So he and I are on the same page. I’ll continue to drink wine in moderation; keep walking Churro, the blog’s associate editor, every day; and watch my diet. No Starbucks death coffee for me, thank you.
Which, if more physicians thought this way, might make an end to this neo-Prohibition foolishness.
by Wine Curmudgeon Posted On
