Good Grape Wine Company

January 8 2007

When Neal Met Bob and 2007 Predictions

Tim at Winecast offers up some excellent predictions (found here) on the wine world for 2007 and one of his predictions has to do with a blogger going mainstream.  He says,

At Least One Wine Blogger ‘Goes Pro’ - One could already argue that some wine bloggers have made the move already with Alder speaking at Antonia Allegra’s Symposium for Professional Wine Writers this year and Lenn introducing his own wine club, but I think a wine blogger will be hired by the established wine press in 2007. My money is on the Wine Spectator to be the innovator who will bring on this blogger as a “guest” but they will remain blogging there long-term.

One of the most under-played stories of 2006, before we get too far away from the year that was, has to be Robert Parker’s re-jiggering of his critics line-up.  Kevin Zraly, David Schildknecht and a guy named Neal Martin, who was formerly a pro-am blogger in the U.K. via his www.wine-journal.com site, all joined Parker’s line-up of writers and critics with seemingly minimal to no disruption to the business at hand.

One might say that Neal Martin might be the benchmark for wine bloggers going pro, having already made the jump mainstream for the blogosphere. 

Martin flew under the radar and out of the stream of consciousness of the U.S. wine blogosphere, but clearly going from being a wine outsider/blogger to a “Critic-at-Large” working for Robert Parker in the span of 48 months is a Cinderella story of some magnitude.

I’ve poked around the Mark Squires boards on the site for Neal’s threads and he’s still in ramp-up mode for sure, but check out his site Wine-Journal site for a three part narrative on the back-story for his ascendance—you can find it here, here and here.  I’m providing a couple of excerpts, as well.  Martin writes in the affected U.K. manner, rife with pop culture reference and graduate level vocab—similar to countryman Nick Hornby, author of books like About a Boy, High Fidelity and others.

Wine-journal started in June 2nd 2003, written by someone with not a book to his name, no column in a magazine or newspaper, no reputation to build upon. But neither did Robert Parker when he started off in the 1970’s and if he can do it then why not I? Even if I got just a couple of readers each day: that would be an achievement. For the first month I got exactly that, a couple of visits each day, usually myself or my mum checking what I had written about her in the diary. November 1st 2006 and during the 31 days in October I have over 130,000 visits and added another 24,000 unique visits from September. Nearly all through word-of-mouth, barely a mention in the press, without any compromise and without any bold proclamations of greatness. It is a readership, a status of affairs that I could never have imagined when I started.

Wine-journal.com built its success on a budget of precisely £11.49 per month including VAT (cue many webmasters to question the zero’s on their technical support bill.) That is everything, my total cost; so if any aspiring young writer reading this wants to express their adoration of Malmsey or Austrian Grüner-Veltliner or English sparkling wine to the Alaskan extremes, South American deltas or the metropolises on the Eastern Seaboard, then just do it - you will be astonished how simple it really is.

So for now I must bid you adieu. However, it will not be long before the site is transferred to its new home and then it is down to business. So dry your eyes because the end is just the beginning.

Neal hits his stride in the next installment where he recounts receiving an inquiry email from a Parker associate:

I maintain my morning ritual: de-scale my cup that is ossified with tea tannin; crank up the PC, open my in-box and then spend the next ten minutes deleting more spam than you would find in a post-war suburban butcher’s counter. Twenty invitations to enlarge my penis (no need thank you) and similar number begging me to share $10,000,000 from Dr. Ubalubu in Nigeria (still nothing in my account despite all his promises.) In fact, these messages are so profligate that I have a reflex action that deletes them in the minimal amount of time, so much so that have occasionally erased something whose modus operandi is not to clog up my mail-box.

It very nearly happens with one whose sender’s name I fail to recognize and with finger hovering over the delete key, I withdraw for the simple reason that it is highlighted in red and has a little flag that henceforth shall indicate “Do not delete me because I am about to change your life.”
I click enter and read the short but to-the-point message. There is this guy, innocuous enough name, claiming to be an associate of Robert Parker, the crux of which is: “We were wondering if you would be interested in becoming a wine critic and writer for The Wine Advocate.”

Check it out and kudos, as well, to Alder for his invitation to the Wine Writers Symposium—he will in all likelihood be next and the first US blogger to expand beyond the digital realm to full-time wine writing gig, as Tim astutely points out. 

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