Five more things the Wine Curmudgeon learned in moving the blog from free to paid

And, again this year, most of them are welcome

The blog’s 15th annual birthday week starts today. So, once again, five things I’ve learned about wine writing, the Internet, and Substack in the almost two years that the blog hasn’t been free:

• Thank you, subscribers. The renewal rate is through the roof – like 95 percent. This, when I changed to Substack, was my biggest concern. Would I be able to avoid what’s called “churn,” where subscribers never increase because the new ones just replace the ones who canceled. And, to be honest, most of the cancellations were welcome – usually subscribers to the old blog who didn’t like the changes and wanted to complain about them.

• The new Substack chat feature. Yes, finally, after 15 years, the WC should be able to hold on-line chats. I’m still not sure how it works (and so far, it’s only for Apple products), but once I figure it out, we can do something that everyone else has been doing for decades. Ain’t technology grand?

• Substack’s free subscriptions. This is a good thing, and I had planned to offer one free post a week when I switched in 2021. The catch is that Substack says the best way to convert free to paid is to insert annoying paywalls and subscribe buttons in the body of the free posts. Which, as hard as I try to feel otherwise, irritates me no end. I want people to read the blog; I have no desire to nag them like a cranky old man sitting on his front port, waving hands and sputtering gibberish. So those of you who get this for free: just sign up. Please. You’ll make my life so much easier.

• The increasing gulf between between the wine business’ idea of reality and actual reality. This is not just about premiumization and rest of the stuff I rant about; it’s that the wine business sees itself as somehow separate from what goes on in the rest of the world. As such. what goes on – pandemic, war in Ukraine, and all the rest – doesn’t matter when it comes to wine. I heard one executive say that people would pay more for wine, regardless of anything else, because they would.

• I’m getting more non-wine news releases, marketing pleas, and PR missives than ever. And no, I don’t know why. What makes it more difficult to figure out is that I pruned my email lists this summer and changed my email to a service that doesn’t sell my information to advertisers. One possible explanation: I think PR people are a lot less fussy these days about who they contact, and if I write about wine and they want to push plant-based sausage (and a lot do), that’s close enough.

Photo: “03-10-1960_17119 Wim Sonneveld” by IISG is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0