Good Grape Wine Company

December 5 2009

What’s Up with Wine Bloggers?

What’s up with wine bloggers?  It’s a question that reads like a Jerry Seinfeld punch line is coming.  Yet, that’s the question a new wine blogger posed in a wine business forum at the online professional networking web site LinkedIN.

The query by Tom Johnson, author of Louisville Juice, and cross-posted at the social networking site Wine 2.0, asks aloud about the lack of engagement intra-family amongst wine bloggers.

In his post and at the discussion forum he notes (emphasis in bold are mine):

I started Louisville Juice six months ago after doing a political/cultural blog for about five years. The thing that strikes me most about the difference is that political blogs interact with each other constantly. They link to each other, argue with each other, give credit to each other. The result of that is to build traffic for everyone and create a more vivid conversation.

All of which leads me to believe that winebloggers do not, in general, value interconnectedness with other wine blogs. My question is: Why not?

It’s an interesting question because for all of the bluster about how revolutionary the impact wine blogs is for the wine world rare is the circumstance that wine bloggers ask themselves a cultural question unless it’s in a defensive stance against a mainstream wine writer / personality / critic. 

Yet, to a certain degree Tom answers his own question in responding to comments to his post.  He says:

There are few great meta-topics that sweep through the wine community – no speech by the President or bill introduced into Congress …

Finally, status in wine(blogs) is dependent on being authoritative, and that’s interpreted by many as being omniscient.  Linking to others is interpreted by some as admitting a lack of knowledge.
This breeds a culture that isn’t as interactive as political blogging, and the result of that is a lack of connection (that) diminishes the value of all wine blogs – even the big, successful ones … because there is (a) less challenging give-and-take, the wineblogs themselves don’t make as much creative progress as they would in a more demanding environment.  Finally, readers never get a sense of how big and lively the wineblog universe is.

As I approach my fourth year of wine blogging with over a 1000 posts and 750,000 words written I have some perspective on this, all earned by observation and effort.

10 Truths about Wine Blogging

10) Credibility is Paramount

Unlike politics where everybody has a valid opinion, wine is predicated on deep knowledge, or analysis.  This is only demonstrated by a personal back story that leads to credible belief or a body of work that demonstrates it over a lengthy period of time.  At every turn you’re not trying to prove your point, you’re trying to prove your smarts.  It’s a meritocracy at its finest.

9) Top blogs have cultivated a specific platform / brand / voice / niche

If you look at Vinography, Good Wine Under $20, Fermentation, Steve Heimoff, Dr. Vino, 1WineDude, Lenndevours or other top blogs you immediately (or quickly) know what they stand for.

8) What you drank last night = ZZZ’s

There are several wine blogs like this that are well done, but the majority of them, if combined with a lack of #10 or #6, are DOA

7) Geography is important.

One correlation you can immediately draw from the list of top blogs is their authors all live on the coasts near or in significant wine culture.  Guys like me, or Tim at Cheapwineratings in Cincinnati have to work twice as hard to prove item #10.  Newcomers are better off focusing locally to earn readers because national awareness (which is validated by readers from the wine industry) is difficult to come by.

6) Networking and relationships matter

Unless a wine blogger is committed to building relationships on a one-to-one basis via email, using Twitter to cultivate mindshare in the online wine jetstream, being a part of OWC where the American Wine Blog awards originate, actively commenting on other blogs, doing different types of marketing outreach for your content and ensuring your site is optimized for the search engines, you’re going to struggle with awareness and traffic – and it will be a struggle that links from other bloggers won’t solve.  Oh, yeah, this is on top of your writing being good and original in the first place.

5) Content is king, as is the how you construct that content

Wine blogging is and has been different than other forms of blogging – it’s longer form, and only fractionally about current events.  Even if under the guise of current events, posts are typically longer and more reasoned.  This leads to less content output, but also less of the “fast food” type of blogging that is a pointer with a link and a snippet of snark, as seen in other niches.

4) Wine as a topic moves glacially with less controversy

One of the virtues of wine is that it is largely a joyous topic with much less controversy than other pop culture-oriented topics.  There are a couple of themes that reappear a few times each year, but by and large writing about original topics and crafting stories with unique insight is most important and certainly more important than quantity of output.

3) Wine as a topic – online and offline is predicated by stories and thought-leadership

Online, this leads to less comments, less intra-writer engagement and less viral topics, it also leads to less boredom with sycophants saying the same thing differently

2) Meta topics = Don’t mingle with the hoi polloi

Wine is reasonably genteel and a very small community.  Many, many people choose not to take the bait on polarizing topics

1) Life is competition

A significant factor to Tom’s perceived lack of community is the fact there is an inherent level of competition amongst wine bloggers.  It’s a competitive reality show unfolding over years and what’s at stake is the opportunity to burnish your star.  I think most bloggers are team players, but also motivated by a healthy self-interest – it’s pretty similar to any professional work environment.  Therefore, it’s less about collegial conversation and more about honing craft and personal development.

1A) What’s your success metric?

When I started blogging in January 2006 there were around 75 wine blogs.  Now?  There are over 1000.  In addition, wine blogging hasn’t monetized.  If your goals aren’t orientated towards self-satisfaction and scratching a personal itch WITHOUT exterior validation, you’re destined for disappointment because the ship has sailed for a new voice to ascend to the top of the wine blogging pyramid.  The shakeout of the masses is a more imminent reality over the next year or two.

Overall, Tom’s post gave me pause for thought – what does the blogging community look like from the outside looking in?  The answer is:  vibrant, interesting, with a high level of quality at the highest levels.  Unfortunately, I think Tom is correct, though – one thing the competitive wine blogosphere isn’t is conversational around cycle or news driven topics. Nor is it very nurturing.

Perhaps it’s to the detriment of fostering “conversation,” while being forbidding to newcomers (readers and bloggers alike), yet, I have a hard time taking issue because I know the next generation of wine writers, people who are serious and committed, are currently honing their craft and preparing for the time when preparation meets opportunity, even if its absent today’s feel good water cooler chat.

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October 4 2009

Announcing the Oregon Wine Cuinsinternship Winner

There is something quixotic about falling in love.  Since time immemorial couples have captured it and drunk its nectar yielding a heady absence of rational thought coupled with a passionate sensibility that anything is possible.  For many, love is impossibly addictive—always seeking the freshness of feeling that comes from giving yourself over to something that is bigger than you.  For others, the drunken song that empowers but renders us helpless grows into something stronger, deeper, and lasting.

In many respects, wine enthusiasm isn’t much different than falling in love – it’s elusive, it’s mystifying and it can cause a life-long chase for the alchemy that occurs when je ne sais quoi meets up with time, circumstance and effort.

I was a 2nd round judge for the winemaker promotion portion of the recently wrapped up Oregon Cuisinternship program.  The eventual winner of the contest, as selected by Lynn Penner-Ash, the hostess for the one-week internship, from Penner-Ash winery, probably saw the same thing that I did. David Katz and his girlfriend Virginia, from Los Angeles, did an amazing trick – they managed to capture a sense of love, of passion, a feeling that anything is possible and they married it with wine.  For that, they earned the one week harvest internship at the winery with Lynn.

I caught up with David and asked him to elaborate on his interest in wine.  Katz noted,  “Every time I have been to a vineyard, I always leave having learned a great deal.  I love the idea of having to take a risk on something that you had to work very hard on in order for it to succeed. All the elements have to come together in just the right way to yield that amazing bottle of wine.”

True words, David, true words. And, he unwittingly also described the process of sustaining love over a period of time. 

Congrats to David and Virginia.  May they continue to find wisdom in the glass and nourish that drunken song that comes with being in love, for the long haul.

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September 19 2009

The Closed Loop

Have you ever been in a discussion with your husband or wife and said something that you thought was inconsequential and suddenly your fecund discussion takes a left turn for the worse and is prolonged for 40 minutes while you bear the wrath of a furrowed brow and animated gestures?

It’s no different than the grade school recess conversation that inadvertently bruises feelings and leads to the loud proclamation, “You must be Crazy!”

I’ve been on the receiving end of the, “You Must be Crazy” this week after writing a post questioning a column Matt Kramer wrote in the October 15, 2009 issue of Wine Spectator.

Normally, I let posts stand as an individual slice of time and perspective, but I want to re-visit this one to ensure my point is clear.

And, apparently, nobody gives a rip when you take a shot at Robert Parker, folks will even help you align your sight adjustment, but people come to the defense of Matt Kramer, bedecked in hunters’ orange in the wine world of life. 

In particular, I wrote a sentence that wasn’t the main point of my original column, it was a small point within a larger point, and was obviously ill-explained based on the feedback I received.

I said:

While they talk about credibility, they don’t acknowledge the brand boost that they get writing for Spectator, Enthusiast, or other traditional outlets. Speaking of credibility, I really have no idea what gives Kramer and the rest of them any more individual credibility then Joe Blogger down the street, but I know that they write for outlets that help burnish their own image. With due respect to Matt Kramer, without Wine Spectator he probably doesn’t get a chance to write books. Ditto that for others. I’d hazard a guess and say that the Wine Spectator masthead has done more for affording wine writer’s ancillary opportunities than anything else in the modern wine era, 1970’s – to present day.

Specifically, I got some grief for the sentence, “Speaking of credibility, I really have no idea what gives Kramer and the rest of them any more individual credibility then Joe Blogger down the street …” Comments were unfortunately closed on the post due to a technical issue, but several people took issue after the fact and let me know that I was, essentially, an idiot.  Certainly, that’s fair criticism in the realm of “perception is reality.”

However, let me explain my reality with a little more context to the sentence … The column and sentence in question was neither a head-in-the-sand attack nor muckraking.

Matt Kramer is a very talented writer, one of the few reasons I subscribe to a certain magazine, and the author of three books that I have read and own.  I’ve read his seminal book Making Sense of Wine three times, in fact.  It might be the most valuable book I’ve ever read on wine.  In fact, if you search my site for “Matt Kramer” you’ll see numerous references, all of them reverentially tendered.  In addition, if you go to the “Good Grape Recommends” section you’ll see a recommendation for Making Sense of Wine.  My writing style, where I take a long-form columnist-style approach with a beginning, middle, and end with a point, is heavily influenced by Kramer.

So, yes, I know the Matt Kramer of today, a writer with, apparently, 33 years of wine writing experience, according to one blogger who took me to task, explaining he has been writing about wine since 1976. I know he has written for Wine Spectator since 1985 (when I was a 6th grader playing Nerf football during recess at St. Jude’s and drinking Capri Sun’s at lunch). 

Of course, I know who Matt Kramer is now, after he has written books, after he has written for Spectator for almost 25 years.  But, what was Matt Kramer doing when he was six years into his wine writing career circa 1981, five years hence to his work at Spectator and eight years prior to writing Making Sense of Wine?  Where was he, what was he doing and what were his credentials at that point in time?

This is an important question, because the lifetime of wine blogging is but 6 years old. 

The point that I glanced at, but obviously didn’t get across is: if somebody is going to make suggestions for credibility with online wine writers, then let’s compare apples to apples.  The longest tenured wine blogger has been doing it for 6 years.  Okay, great.  What was Matt Kramer, Jim Laube, or anybody else doing when they were six years into their wine writing career?

My guess is that they were probably somewhere along the same learning curve as many of the best online wine writers.

Credibility is really a function of time and is intrinsically linked to reputation.  The former is the inspiration of belief and the latter is public perception.

Yet, to play the credibility card, to mix apples and oranges, based on their tenure relative to others, seems a trifle off to me … particularly because there is a scant difference between reputation and credibility, and mainstream writers trade heavily on reputation, reputation that is built by several factors. 

First, most mainstream wine writers trade on the brand established by their employer and their historical reputation that gives them a credible whole.  However, their credibility, separate from brand, tenure and reputation, is questionable.

Does that make sense?  It’s a really nuanced point for a blog post and goes to the core to the thumping bass line that is mainstream wine writer’s principal point about online wine media. 

Let me put a fine point on it:  absent Matt Kramer’s reputation, and long body of work what makes him credible? 

People are credible based on their reputation, which is based on their body of work.  Their reputation is built based on who they associate with and their whole.

Perhaps it might have been better if Kramer took the tone of mentoring with open arms instead of delicately rebuking. He could have suggested that online wine writers work on their craft in long form to build reputation and he could have done so in a paternal sense instead of questioning sense.

So, overall, no, I’m not crazy, but when I say I have no idea what gives Matt Kramer any more credibility than Joe Blogger, what I am really saying is, “All things considered, strip away the books and the brand, and the modern day reputation, and what gives Matt Kramer more credibility than an online wine writer aside from tenure that can’t be duplicated?” And, what precisely was he doing when he was 4, 5 or 6 years into his wine writing career that can act as an equivalent reference point?

Overall, my comments weren’t a statement of lunacy, or a delusional lack of context, not knowing what I don’t know, it was a statement of sobriety.  And, if somebody can help me better understand then I might be more inclined to improve upon my sixth-grade progress report given to me when Kramer started writing for Spectator, “Jeff enjoys recess with his peers, is bright and confident and shows leadership capabilities, but he regularly questions the institutional structure of authority.”

And it’s that institutional structure of authority that is really what this is all about.

*Note* For a differing tact that focus on technical assessment of wine, check out my editorial at Palate Press.

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September 14 2009

Who is in Judgment of Whom?

Since Robert Parker issued a sharp rebuke of online wine writers in April of this year, it has become fashionable for members of the wine establishment to offer up ponderous questions and cautionary tales regarding the legitimacy of online wine writers and the changing wine media landscape.

Regrettably, respected and erudite writer Matt Kramer is the latest to do so in the October 15th issue of Wine Spectator with the equally regrettable headline, “Judgment Day.” 

I’m a betting man, and I’d be willing to bet Kramer doesn’t write his own headlines and wishes somebody would have given him a better one for his latest column.  It takes a certain kind of hubris to use a headline like, “Judgment Day,” and suggest that you’re standing in judgment of people who write for little more than the satisfaction that comes with a passion for the written word and wine.

And, while Kramer’s comments are reasonably innocent, he’s not alone.  He joins a long line of folks that includes the aforementioned Parker, Steve Heimoff, Jim Gordon, Anthony Dias Blue, and others who have used their platform to issue a cautionary clarion call with varying degrees of bellow.  And, ironically enough, Kramer’s column trades on some of the same ideas that blogger Tom Wark wrote in a blog post from early August where he analyzed a column from the email newsletter of mainstream wine writer Dan Berger.

This on and offline writer thing gets confusing pretty quickly because the medium is no longer the message.  This is why most mainstream writers play the “credibility” card.  And, in another interesting bit of irony, since 2007, major wine magazines who once intermittently gave recommendations for good wine blogs to read, have largely gone silent—implicitly supporting the fact that they don’t view blogs as complementary to their work, but rather supplementary.  Given that, there’s not much else to affront except for the tenure and credibility of the “free” they’re fighting against. 

This ongoing mainstream wine writer public service announcement about online writers can be distilled into two simple messages:  “Who are these guys?” and “Don’t be so quick to give your trust.” 

The crux of Kramer’s Spectator column falls into this familiar boilerplate, as well, when he notes:

Many tasters—most, even—are adept at dissecting a wine.  It’s good, it’s bad, it’s humdrum.  This is the “flat earth” approach.  You only go as far as the wine takes you and declare that you have reached the limit of the knowable world.  There is no dot-connecting involved.

Kramer continues, “Is it enough that the person went to a big tasting?  Or once samples a vertical of the wine?  The challenge today for those wish to acquire credibility is to demonstrate a foundation of knowledge … now give us some reason to credit your judgment.  And that takes more – a lot more—than a sip, a spit and a quick tasting note.”

With all of this meta-analysis in between on and offline wine writing you’d think that navel-gazing, a distinctly blogger-like symptom, was the H1N1 virus in the traditional wine writer’s dorm room.  This ongoing, thinking-out-loud questioning smacks of an interfamilial, brother-in-arms conversation amongst the old guard; an “I’m in the foxhole with you” statement of flying bullets bravado.

Even more peculiar, if you are to believe the established wine writers, is the fact that their target, the enemy as it were, is seemingly invisible – Al Qaeda in the hills of Afghanistan.  None of these established writers cite specifics when they mention online wine media; instead they offer broad proclamations and veiled allusions like George W. Bush and his “weapons of mass destruction” circa 2002.  Those that are active with a blog, a message board presence, or a tasting note account are left to wonder who and what these mainstream wine personalities are actually referring to. Their neutered commentary is not just akin to a gun without bullets, but a gun that also has a visible safety catch on.

Some might call this message delivery from the paid professionals a form of mentoring, others might call it defensive, yet others may call it a “Swan Song.”  I don’t believe it’s any of those—I simply believe it’s misguided.

Each of these mainstream wine writer’s miss several very key points in their ongoing analysis of online wine media, including:

1) Amongst the inevitable drivel is significant quality, particularly in areas of coverage that is more niche-oriented.

2)  Many (most?) of the old guard of wine writers are predominantly male and have been in the game for 25 years or more.  What these guys don’t say is that they started somewhere and it took them an immeasurably longer trip on the road to individual respectability than the five or so years that wine blogs have been in existence (the amount of time they are affording before standing in “judgment”).

3) While they talk about credibility, they don’t acknowledge the brand boost that they get writing for Spectator, Enthusiast, or other traditional outlets.  Speaking of credibility, I really have no idea what gives Kramer and the rest of them any more individual credibility then Joe Blogger down the street, but I know that they write for outlets that help burnish their own image.  With due respect to Matt Kramer, without Wine Spectator he probably doesn’t get a chance to write books.  Ditto that for others.  I’d hazard a guess and say that the Wine Spectator masthead has done more for affording wine writer’s ancillary opportunities than anything else in the modern wine era, 1970’s – to present day.

On the other hand, you want an act of credibility?  Start a blog out of nowhere, for virtually no money, earning virtually no money and earn a readership.  That’s very credible in its sheer difficulty.

4) Most of this us v. them mentality is a result of unacknowledged friction based on content.  Mainstream wine writers largely write for an audience that doesn’t live online.  I’ll go one step further and say that most literate wine readers and writers of wine blogs find mainstream wine content deadly dull, contrived and pedantically insulting.  This creates an environment where bloggers take shots and the magazines respond with commentary couched in the veil of questioning credulousness.

This has nothing to do with anything other than good old neighborly sniping.

Overall, I’m weary of the credibility card and the “up-on-high” pontificating from the mainstream wine press.

The reality is that an existing highway and an onramp are merging and the sooner that the speeding car moves over a lane, and the merging vehicle drives defensively, the better off (and safer) we’ll all be – and, that’s the only judgment I’m willing to concede.

*Ed. Note* Because of page length limitations in my system set-up, additional comments to this post are not displaying.  I’m working on a longer-term fix.  Thanks!

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