Good Grape Wine Company

April 6 2007

Thoughts From the Wine and Food Blogosphere

Oddly, food and wine are intrinsically linked and natural complements, but on the Internet you have two distinct camps and never do the rivers really meet.  Sure you have Fork & Bottle and a couple of other good blogs that cover territory in both the edible and quaffing arts, but for the most part people stick to either being a foodie blogger or a wine blogger. 

Actually I guess the same is true for mass media like Food Network. They don’t have a single damn show about wine.

It seems like kind of a slight, actually. 

Taking a cue from popular media must be the reason there really aren’t *any* blogs period marrying food and wine by, say, a professional like a Sommelier that talks with intelligence, wit and verve about pairings and life on his/her feet working in white table cloth restaurant.

If there are blogs like this that I’m missing, please leave a comment and point them out to me.

I’d really like to see a blog that covers food and wine from the perspective of a Wine Director or a Sommelier—not a snarky, ‘too cool for school’ blog, but one that really tells it like it is from the trenches—stories of the distributor reps., and the boorish patrons and the annual junkets and the egoist chef that wants to pair Pinot with everything.

There are blogs certainly like this in virtually every micro-niche category:

• When I want to get the between the lines good stuff in sports, I read the blog Deadspin. 

• When I want to get celebrity gossip (which isn’t that often, actually) I read Perez Hilton.
• When I want to get the straight skinny on what’s happening in the world of wine distribution, I read Fermentation

• When I want the straight dope on all things food and the restaurant business related I read Michael Ruhlman’s blog.

Michael Ruhlman, surprisingly, has incredible chops having written three books that make up something of a set of must-read books for those in the food know—The Soul of a Chef, The Reach of a Chef and The Making of a Chef.
Anthony Bourdain, he of the Travel Channel and an author in his own right with the must-read Kitchen Confidential, is a guest blogger on the site and pulls no punches.  He wrote a hilariously scathing post in February about Food Network personalities that made its way into the internet jetstream and also received a mention on Dr. Vino’s site (found here).

But, the really curious thing is, if you watch the Food Network as I do and in the quantity that I do then you know all of the personalities … personalities that Bourdain doesn’t so much eviscerate (okay he does eviscerate Sandra Lee, but she deserves it), but merely point out foibles in their handling as food personalities.

Somehow missing in action in all of this Bourdain commentary is the one guy that could be the food and wine bridge for Food Network, blogs, and, well, mankind.  I’m speaking of Michael Chiarello.

Bourdain completely passes over Michael Chiarello, the guy with the perpetual dinner party of “friends” that act like they have never met before, on his cooking show, Easy Entertaining with Michael Chiarello.

Chiarello is the one guy with wine roots. Filmed on location in Napa at Trefethen winery, his show is the only show on the Food Network that is remotely close to wine.  In fact, Chiarello has his own vineyard and makes a pretty darn good bottle of juice, too—if the reviews are accurate.  AND, he is a former Chef at the Napa restaurant Tra Vigne, too.

So, here’s my gauntlet—somebody needs to start writing a wine and food blog with some insider authority and a professional bent, or Anthony Bourdain needs to start calling out all of the Food Network chefs so the one guy that has a link to the wine industry can get his proper due (or even skewering).  Or, Michael Chiarello is going to have sidestep all of this nonsense and simply start his own blog with his own initiative and write about the ins and outs of food and wine, his restaurant experience and the challenges in running a wine lifestyle business.

No less than an information hungry online public demands it. 

Posted in, Around the Wine Blogosphere. Permalink | Comments (0) |

Print

Comments