The blog’s (almost) annual do-it-yourself wine review

This year, we’re waiting for Substack to catch up to the WC

One of my favorite things to write has been the blog’s do-it-yourself wine review, which I’ve posted the past eight years. The idea has always been to poke fun at wine reviews, the wine business, and all the rest of the foolishness and pretension.

Which, in 2022, was especially relevant given the upside down world that wine has made for itself. To quote: “four reviews for wine that costs much more than it’s worth, the kind of wine that only a winery CFO and its marketing team could love.” And how do I know this? I get samples of these wines all the time, as well as a surprising number of emails from the marketing team when I dare to question the wines’ reason for being.

The catch since moving to Substack? The platform doesn’t allow the coding to make these work. One can’t use HTML to create the drop-down menu so you can select the various bits of wit, which is the point of the piece. (And, as always, thanks to Al Yellon, since I stole the idea from him all those years ago.)

So, for 2023, a link to the 2022 version on the old website, which is available to all paid subscribers. (So subscribe now!) And that post includes links to the previous seven, each of which is damned interesting in its own right.

Hopefully, Substack – since adding real-time chat and its Twitter-like Notes service – will do something about adding the necessary coding in time for next year.

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