The metaphysical challenges of wine writing

Wine writing is the best job in the world, except for the sometimes existential angst involved

The Wine Curmudgeon is the luckiest man in the world – I get to drink wine for a living. Still, that doesn’t mean that there aren’t challenges in what I do, the quirky and the odd and the warped moments of my wine writing existence. Call them metaphysical, because trying to understand them often makes my brain hurt.

• The news releases that pimp for cheap wine, and often crummy cheap wine. I got one the other day: “It turns out that there are some wonderful wines out there for under $10, and they come in every color, every flavor, and they’re on the shelves proudly displaying their fancy labels just like their expensive counterparts. Even better, you don’t need to be a sommelier to purchase them with confidence.” Sigh. Have I made no difference at all in almost 10 years?

• The LinkedIn invitations from people that I don’t know and who have nothing to do with wine. I don’t understand LinkedIn to begin with (do we really need Facebook for corporate types?), so maybe I’m missing something. But why would anyone want to “connect with me” who sells snack chips or works for a health care system?

• UPS and FedEx, which jam my inbox with emails detailing when I’m supposed to get a package (usually a wine sample), but which never shows up. It’s not so much that the package doesn’t arrive; I’ve learned to live with that. Rather, why would multi-billion dollar companies waste so much time and effort to tell me a package is coming when it isn’t?

• The dread and fear that every post is starting to sound exactly the same. In one respect, this is unavoidable — I’ve been writing 200-word wine reviews for 10 years, and there are only so many ways to do that. But what sets this site apart from most of the others is the writing; if that isn’t top-notch, what’s the point? You might as well suffer through toasty and oaky Winestream Media tasting notes.