Why I Am Publishing the Wine Tribune
I have launched The Wine Tribune on behalf of a specific audience: ordinary, non-affluent wine drinkers who can rarely afford to spend more than — or even as much as — the cost of an affordable, home-cooked meal on a bottle of wine.
I shall do so employing reasoned arguments underpinned by long experience with wine in restaurants, retail, the wine trade, promotion, as a wine educator who has done a great deal of reading, and, of course, as a wine consumer and lover. Throughout, I shall, when relevant, frame issues in a socio-historical perspective to illuminate and contextualize my arguments.
Ordinary, non-affluent people who drink modestly priced wines are largely ignored by ‘important’, or ‘serious’ established wine journalists, scorers, critics, and educators; but they are not unimportant; and certainly not a minority. They constitute, in fact, the great majority of wine consumers, and they buy from 80% to 90% or more — depending on the selected price cutoff point — of the wine sold in the U.S. And many of them, despite their non-affluence, are people who love wine and/or who appreciate how it enriches their meals, lives, and families.
Outside the Expensive Wine Information Loop
Yet most of them do not subscribe to wine magazines, to the major metropolitan newspapers that publish wine columnists, nor to wine newsletters. They do not belong to wine clubs; they do not pay to attend what, for them, are expensive wine tastings or wine classes; neither do they buy expensive wines online.
They are, quite simply, ignored by the established wine intelligentsia, save for the occasional condescending ‘cheap wine’ issues or sections that underscore that condescension by their off-topic infrequency.
To be fair, there are probably thousands of wine bloggers who write for non-affluent consumers, and some are excellent. They seek good lower-priced wine values, employ consistent standards, avoid unnecessary jargon, and stand above fashionable trends and clichés. But they swim in a sea teeming with copycat evaluators, dishonest hucksters, biased producing-area/industry shils, cutesy trend amplifiers, and, even worse, ‘wine and me’ diarists of wearisome lives who bury us in a landslide of selfies and photos of wine bottles that overwhelm thin strata of subjective, pointless prose content — in these cases, perhaps, an unintended blessing.
There Are Good Blogs for Wine Plebs, but…
Very few working people who are not wealthy, comfortably unemployed, otherwise subsidized, or in some way paid to do so, can afford to spend massive chunks of time online reading and evaluating wine blogs, especially if they have families, children, or other household arrangements that require time and care. Sifting through the wine blog profusion is neither easy nor swift, even for someone like me, who is retired and has considerable wine experience. The excellent ones exist, but it takes time to find them, and the process can be numbing to most consumers.
The Best Advice Sources for Wine Plebs Are Disappearing
To all this, we must add the near disappearance of the single best source of wine advice for those average buyers fortunate enough to have found one — a knowledgeable owner or employee at a good, non-elite, local wine shop or party store or a similarly informed wine section manager in a larger retail format. These sources of advice have been changing too, in ways that disadvantage buyers of modestly priced wines, but they are driven by multiple developments: in generational tastes, in affluent enclaving and gentrification, in retailing, in consolidation, and other areas. They require more space to explain, and I shall deal with them in subsequent posts on specific topics that touch upon them.
Peter di Lorenzi
AN ADDENDUM and DISCLAIMER
I am part of that cross-generational clustering that came of age at a time when, happily, the need for fast touch-typing skill was pretty much limited to writers, journalists, those in clerical and information/data entry work and to bureaucrats. The bulk of the population had no need to master speed typing. I’ve known journalists and writers who typed as I do: with two fingers and a reflexive, anticipatory sense of the keyboard acquired over time by repetitive mind/muscle memory.
Certainly, few of my peers ever anticipated that the ability to type faster than their minds can think would become a necessary and hugely time-consuming social and work skill throughout massive chunks of entire generations. Fewer still would have guessed that entire speed-of-light transmission technologies and ultimately commercial outlets with billions of viewers would come into existence — all for the dissemination and preservation of precisely this sort of babble — touch-typed or, ever more commonly, typed on tiny virtual keyboards with [just two, again, but even more improbable] fat thumbs!
All this is by way of making clear that in these blogs, I will only occasionally further slow an already slow process by typing obvious counter-totalizing disclaimers such as: “most, but not every”, “the overwhelming majority of”, or “…but this does not hold for all cases”, and so on ad nauseam. To me, they are implicit; and obviously so. We all think and speak that way; we all generalize about aggregates. In thinking and in ordinary life, we all make choices and decisions based on probabilistic generalizations — well-understood not to be absolutely universal — far more frequently than we make them based on impossibly detailed knowledge of all specific factors and options involved. Or else, they more commonly assume that they are employing the only really relevant variables. That conceit, the pervasive but easily turned self-serving assumption in the ceteris paribus world of academic soft ‘sciences, is one I no longer entertain.
The Wine Tribune 