Tag Archives: wine writing

wine critics

10 signs that you’ve been writing about wine too long

writing about wineHow do you know you’ve been writing about wine for too long? When you notice any of these 10 things:

1. Auto-complete on your phone fills in words like sauvignon and terroir when you’re sending a text.

2. You send text messages with words like sauvignon and terroir.

3. You know more about the brands that PR people are trying to get you to write about than the PR people do.

4. The PR people who used to try to get you to write about those brands are retired and living in Maine. Or Napa. Or Burgundy.

5. You realize you’re not the youngest person judging at a wine competition – and you haven’t been for several years.

6. Younger people want to judge with you at wine competitions because you have more experience than they do.

7. You remember when people drank white zinfandel – lots and lots of white zinfandel – instead of rose.

8. Eight retailers where you bought wine have gone out of business. And three of them were big local chains.

9. You need to check much more often to make sure you’re not writing the same blog post that you wrote a year ago.

10. The same crappy wines get the same 92-point scores, and you still can’t figure out why.

Photo courtesy of the Falstaff Wild website, using a Creative Commons license

More about wine writing:
• The metaphysical challenges of wine writing
• 8 signs you’ve been writing about wine for too long
• The 10 things an author worries about after writing a wine book

Robot typing at keyboard

Followup: New Wine Curmudgeon features

wine curmudgeon features
Now how do I send that weekly email?

Look for a weekly email — and maybe live chat – to start later this summer

Sometime in the next couple of months, I’ll start adding some of the features you suggested in last week’s new Wine Curmudgeon features post. Thanks to everyone who completed the survey and left comments.

The two most popular requests? A weekly email highlighting what was on the blog over the past five days and live chat, where you can ask me questions. The first is easy enough to do, and is actually something that most website types recommend as standard practice.

The second is more complicated. That’s because I have to find the best time to hold a chat session so it’s convenient for people to virtually attend. I’ve done these in the past for other websites, and it’s embarrassing when only a couple of people show up to ask questions. But I’ll see if there is a way to make it work.

I’m also going to try a monthly food and wine pairing, using a recipe that I made and the wines I served with it. Thanks to David for the suggestion.

In this, about two-thirds of you wanted to tweak what we’re already doing here, which was good to see. I was surprised that so few of you wanted to buy wine through the website, which was the fifth most requested of the seven choices. However, I will soon be able to  link to Wine.com, a long-time pal of the blog, and get an affiliate commission for any wine mentioned here that you buy through Wine.com.

And there weren’t any surprises about what you don’t you want to see – reviews of more expensive wines and guest writers. If we did that, the Wine Curmudgeon blog wouldn’t be the Wine Curmudgeon blog, would it?

Ask the WC 12: $5 wine, varietal character, negative reviews

$5 wine
Yes, Abe, there is $5 wine worth buying.

This edition of Ask the WC: Is there quality $5 wine?

Because the customers always have questions, and the Wine Curmudgeon has answers in this irregular feature. Ask the Wine Curmudgeon wine-related question by clicking here.

Hello Wine Curmudgeon:
You advocate cheap wine, but is there anything cheaper than $10, which is your cutoff, worth drinking? Are there $5 wines I can buy?
On a fixed income

Dear Fixed:
There is lots of $5 and $6 wine; Barefoot at about $6 is the best-selling wine in the U.S. But finding wine at that price that is interesting and varietally correct is difficult, which is why I use $10. Your best bet would be the Rene Barbier red and white (though the red isn’t what it was) at about $4, and several Italian Chiantis, like Melini, that cost around $6. Otherwise, you get what you pay for.

•

Dear Wine Curmudgeon:
I’m confused by some of your reviews. Your write that wine should have varietal character. What is that? Doesn’t it matter that it just tastes good?
I like good wine

Dear Good:
Varietal character, to me, is the most important thing in wine. Does a cabernet sauvignon taste like a cabernet sauvignon? Does a chardonnay taste like a chardonnay? Otherwise, what’s the point? Why buy a sauvignon blanc that doesn’t taste like sauvignon blanc? Unfortunately, Big Wine doesn’t think varietal character is as important as I do, and tends to make wines that have similar characteristics regardless of varietal – soft red wines with little tannin, lots of fruit, and too much fake oak, whether the wine is cabernet, merlot, or pint noir. That may be a good wine, if you like that style, but it’s not very interesting.

•

Hello, Wine Curmudgeon:
How come you don’t write negative reviews? I’d assume that someone as cranky as you are would enjoy saying nasty things about bad wine.
Puzzled in Pennsylvania

Dear Puzzled:
That’s a question I get asked a lot, and my old pal Dave Falchek, who writes reviews for the Scranton newspaper, has taken me to task for not doing it. And I do sometimes include wines I don’t think are well made in the monthly mini-reviews. But I’m here to find cheap wine worth drinking, and I think it’s more important to write about those wines in the wines of the week and the other reviews than to show how clever and snarky I can be.

More Ask the Wine Curmudgeon:
• Ask the WC 11: Arsenic lawsuit, marijuana, wine competitions
• Ask the WC 10: Spanish wine, wine prices, oak
• Ask the WC 9: Premiumization, wine bottles, Chicago Cubs

No, the Wine Curmudgeon is not your PR “partner”

partnering
PR people. do you get the hint?

Why do so many PR professionals think my job is to shill for them?

Today’s 21st century wine marketing question: Why do so many public relations professionals expect me to shill for their products?

I am asked to do that regularly, and got two just the other day – one offered me a “collaboration opportunity,” while the other asked: Could we “partner with you” in sending wines for review?

Sigh.

Let’s explain this one more time. The blog’s existence depends on the trust and goodwill I have earned over the past decade. People do not come here because I am collaborating or partnering (and don’t get me started on what an abomination that word is) with a producer, but for the exact opposite reason: Because they know I am completely independent, and probably too independent for my own good.

But since this is the 21st century, what I want or believe doesn’t matter. We’re all here to sell crap, because isn’t that what the Internet is for? And I’m just a blogger, so I couldn’t possibly be as smart or as sophisticated as the people offering to “help” me. And the idea that some of us think we have a moral obligation to be impartial, and that our responsibility is to our readers and not to a marketing flack or the hooey they’re peddling? Why, that’s as quaint and as old-fashioned as typewriters and carbon paper.

I’m not the only one, of course, who has to endure this. A.O. Scott, the New York Times film critic, saw it during the last Star Wars release: “The spoiler warning sent by the Disney empire instructed journalists to ‘continue to be our partners on this journey,’ and defiance is unthinkable, even if ‘partner’ is taken as a synonym for ‘shill.’ ”

So, for the benefit of everyone who thinks my job is to write nice things regardless of what I actually think (and for Disney, since A.O. Scott is sort of a friend of the blog), here’s how it works:

I’m a critic. I review things. I don’t accept payment or any other quid pro quos for my reviews. Send me a wine, and there are no guarantees. If you don’t like that, then don’t send me any wines. That’s fine with me.

And please, please, please. Don’t tell me you’ve read the blog and enjoy it when your next sentence says you want to partner with me. Because who is kidding who then?

Winebits 484: Boxed wine, wine crime, wine foolishness

boxed wineThis week’s wine news: Sound advice about boxed wine, more wine crime, and why people who don’t understand wine shouldn’t write about it

• Bring on the box: Americans, for whatever reason, still don’t think much about boxed wine. Thls post, from the Lifehacker site, explains why that’s not a very progressive attitude. “… while boxed wines have long been associated with poor quality, they’re just like traditional cork and bottled wines—there are good ones and there are bad ones.” Which, of course, is true for wine no matter what it comes in and no matter what it costs. Lifehacker comes in for a lot of criticism on the blog for its wine posts, but this is not one of those posts. Yes, there is a bizarre reference to the wine and arsenic scare as well as the implication that Two-buck Chuck comes in boxes, but the boxed wines it recommends are mostly worth buying and the advice is spot on.

• A wine scam: One day I need to write a post about wine crime, and why so many people are taken in by grifters who have a smooth line of wine patter. As, for example, the various English men and women who gave a long-time villain £104,000 (about US$129,000) to pay for fake wine packages. The criminal posed as a multi-millionaire wine dealer named Lars Petraeus, fleecing his victims, including what the story describes as a prominent food blogger.

• No, no no: As noted in the item above, people who don’t write much about wine too often don’t do a very good job of it. Case in point is this line, from a website called Digital Trends that is shilling for a wine purifier: The gadget helps in “removing sulfites and restoring its natural taste.” Which is patently untrue, since sulfites occur naturally in wine and are part of its natural taste, whatever that is. Or how about this one? “Sulfites tend to give wine an unpleasantly bitter taste,” which also seems odd, since tannins (as well as bad grapes and bad winemaking) give wine a bitter taste. My guess is that the writer cut and pasted the news release for the gizmo, accepting as gospel whatever the release said. Which is bad form, regardless of whether you are writing about wine or politics or whatever.

Has the WC finally become a big-time wine blogger?

wine blogger
Chin up, Kolchak. Maybe, one day, you can be as important as I am.

Am I really “an important wine blogger” with “a large audience and followers around the world”?

Forget the awards. Forget the groundbreaking achievements. Forget the advocacy for local wine and rose. The Wine Curmudgeon has officially hit the big time.

How do I know this? From two events last week: An email from the Union des Grands Crus de Bordeaux, which represents more than 100 wineries in that region of France, and a box of samples from Bogle Vineyards.

The first matters because Bordeaux is Bordeaux, the be all and end all of all things wine. In the end, as the legendary Richard Carleton Hacker told me one bright fall morning in Bordeaux, the sun rising over the vineyards, “This is what every other wine region in the world wants to be.”

So when the email said, “As an important wine blogger having a large audience and followers around the world, we would be glad to invite you to our Grand Crus Tasting on the 20th of May in Bordeaux,” I was floored. How did Bordeaux – pricey, imperious Bordeaux – know about cheap, value-driven me? Let alone that I was important and had a world-wide following? I didn’t know I that I knew it.

And the Bogle samples? That’s because I’ve been singing the praises of the California winery for more than 20 years, but I never got any samples – or even heard anything from the winery. Obviously, I don’t expect constant praise (or even want it, since I value my independence), but it always struck me as odd that no one at Bogle ever said anything to me.

So that the samples arrived – unbidden and unexpected – means that Bogle has noticed me. And given that Bogle is the 11th biggest producer in the country, with 2.3 million cases, and is perhaps the best $10 wine company in the world, noticing me is as important in its way as the Bordeaux email.

But for those of you reading this, not to worry. Even with all this attention, I’ll still be my usual cranky, irritating self. I’ll still keep writing honestly and truly about wine, the wine business, and all the foolishness in between. It’s just that much better to know that more people are paying attention.

wine critics

The metaphysical challenges of wine writing

wine writing
Never thought you’d see Martin Heidegger on a wine blog, did you?

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.