Why do you read about wine you can’t buy?
by Wine Curmudgeon Posted On
How frustrating is it to read about a wine you can’t buy? After all, how often do you read a review of a movie you can’t see?
Some of it, of course, is snobbery — and yes, Winestream Media, I’m talking about you. Some of it can’t be helped, thanks to the foolishness that is the three-tier system. In the last month, I’ve tasted a $10 Gascon white and had friends tell me about a $15 red Bordeaux and a $10 Sicilian red that would be perfect for the blog. But the first is only available in southern California, and the other two are only found in the northeast. Which means the wines don’t have distributors in any other part of the country, and don’t meet the generally available criteria I use for the blog.
But there are other, less obvious reasons why you read about wine you can’t buy:
• To create demand for the wine. I get a lot of emails from publicity people offering me samples of wine from regions unfamiliar to U.S. wine drinkers and that have limited, if any, distribution in this country. They do so in the hope that I’ll write about the wine, even if no one can buy it, so that my review will convince an importer or a distributor that there is demand for it. Yes, it’s a little backwards, but it’s one way to get around the restrictions of the three-tier system.
• Because it’s the next big thing. Wine recommendations are often driven by peer pressure, and if one hotshot sommelier or writer praises something, then everyone else has to do so as well. We’ve seen this for years with gruner veltliner from Austria, which is difficult to buy outside of the East Coast. The most recent next big thing is Greek wine, which can be well done and offer value but is even more difficult to find outside of the East Coast than gruner. In fact, during our recent podcast, that’s what Wisconsin retailer Nick Vorpagel lamented about Greek wine.
• Available wine is boring. I’m paraphrasing here, but I’ve heard and read this countless times: “Why should I write about a wine that anyone can buy in the grocery store?” This isn’t quite the snobbery practiced by reviewers who purposely write about wine no one can buy, but it’s almost as bad. Again, do reviewers not do movies because they’re in 5,000 theaters nationwide?
Of course, I can only speak for myself in this matter. I aslo accept that I am atypical. I like to read about things that are beyond the scope of my experience. I am occasionally inspired to seek out wines that sound interesting.
For example, some time ago 1WineDude wrote something about Portuguese Ramisco. I was intrigued. I did a little digging and managed to have some shipped to me from California. It turned out that there was precious little of it in the US at all. I was fortunate to find a reseller that had some remaining from a coastal Portuguese wine event.
Wine Searcher has changed the dynamic for this issue. Full disclosure: I’m the California editor for Wine Searcher. But even before I wrote for them, I appreciated how anything available anywhere in the US is now available in most of the US.
With shipping costs, you can’t get a $12 wine for $12 on Wine Searcher, and that impacts your particular area of specialization. But for the rest of us who write about wine, wow, it’s a godsend. When I worked in mainstream media, I was always plagued by readers writing to bitch at me, not because whatever wine I recommended wasn’t available — but because it wasn’t available within 10 minutes of their house. Now, I just give a Wine Searcher link. If somebody is interested in trying the wine, they can buy it. If not, a lot of people read travel stories about Jamaica without ever going there.
The catch here is that direct shipping, as practiced by wine-searcher, isn’t legal in every state. You live in California, so it’s not a problem for you, Blake. But I’m committing a felony if I order from a wine retailer that doesn’t have a physical presence in Texas, like wine.com.