The Future Of Wine Writing, Revisited

So… several days ago, I published a minor screed on what I perceived as the grim future of wine writing, which ended up generating a good deal of discussion and more traffic than most people send here to actually read about wine itself… but anyway…

One of the best responses to my rant came via another blog (and yeah, I realize that bu writing about someone writing about me writing about wine is several orders of magnitude of meta), Dwight Furrow’s Edible Arts. Dwight is a PhD (Philosophy) and WSET Advanced and CSW, so I’m going to make the (extremely safe) assumption that he knows what he’s doing when it comes to stringing words together regarding how we as humans conceptualize our discourse on wine.

Dwight’s entire response is worth a read (and so it’s embedded below), but I wanted to highlight two quotes in particular:

“I think Tom [Wark] is right about [ more hopeful view of wine writing’s future ], not because some magical model of paid journalism will reappear—it won’t—but because people will continue to find wine is an object of love worth writing about.”

“We have a disturbing tendency in the U.S. of thinking that the only people who are competent and motivated to do X are people who are paid to do X. Writing and the arts are perhaps the best example of an activity where this assumption doesn’t hold.”

I love this response for several reasons, primarily because Dwight hits on what has made user-generated content such a potent force in today’s marketplace (and in modern discourse, in general). What I love most about it, however, is that it equates amateur content about wine with amateur content about everything since ever. That’s an important reminder, because we tend to forget that amateur content can be excellent, despite the fact that this has been true for a few hundred years. We are distracted by the fact that we can find both the lousy and the excellent amateur wine writing with equal amount of ease in our online world, and so we draw the incorrect conclusion that somehow there is more crap created these days relative to excellence than there has been in the past.

I still find the future of professional wine writing – in terms of making a living at it – very dark, indeed. But Dwight has rekindled a bit of hope in me that wine content in general is likely to remain strong for a good long time.

Cheers!

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Source: Wineries should engage critics
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