I'm a Wine Writer. Who Hates Wine Writers.
Let me reintroduce myself.
This past weekend, I went to the MFK Fisher Women in Food and Storytelling Symposium in Nashville. I went as a scholarship recipient! I tried to play it off like it was no big deal. But really? It was a very big and validating deal for me in this ambivalent transition from wine shop owner to wine writer. Or, should I say: back to wine writer. Because I’ve been here before...
I am still cringing at having to type “wine writer.” I wrote exactly this, in fact, in the essay I had to submit as part of said scholarship’s application:
“So, like, what kind of writing? Wine writing?” my friend Jasmine asked me when I explained to her that I was selling my several very successful and beloved brick-and-mortar wine hospitality businesses to go back to writing.
“GOD NO,” I balked. “Wine writing is awful; I can’t stand reading it.”
I explained to her that my writing was about humanity and connection and community, about why we’re all here and how we make the most of it. My writing consisted of stories told through the lens of or alongside a very delicious and historical beverage made of fermented grapes—a beverage that happens to be in peril seeing as how the World Health Organization has deemed no drop safe for consumption, and how the margins of an already-impossible industry are getting squeezed tighter every day, and how marketers inside keep selling the same bullshit exclusive luxury narrative that alienates women, BIPOC, LGBT+, differently abled and neuro-diverse individuals…
“And! And!” I gasped for breath.
“Mmhmm. Sounds like wine writing,” Jasmine quipped.
M.F.K. Fisher wrote, “So it happens that when I write of hunger, I am really writing about love and the hunger for it, and warmth and the love of it and the hunger for it.”
I realized, thanks to Jasmine and Ms. Fisher, that when I write of my thirst for wine, I am really writing about love and the thirst for it, and community and the love of it and thirst for it. I first fell in love with wine when someone pointed out to me that a bottle is too big for one person to drink alone; it’s a product—unlike anything else I can think of today—that’s inherently designed for sharing in physical community with one another.
And so, when I write about wine, I’m really writing about humanity and connection and community.
Humanity. Connection. Community. They’re all I care about; they’re literally all that keeps me going on my worst and darkest days. Finding and fostering and proliferating them is why I believe I was (all of us were?) put on this planet. And I find them—pure and glimmering and evocative and sensual—nearly each time I sip and savor a bottle of thoughtful, resilient wine.
And so, I write about wine.
But let’s back up a bit. A year into Resilient Wine, I realize some of y’all don’t know me—don’t know who I am or where I’m from, where I’ve been, and why I have any qualifications to write what I’m writing right now.
I got to meet Ruth Reichl at the Symposium. I made her take a photo with me, which was incredibly awkward and whose outcome downplays how much she probably wanted anything other than to take photos with tiny plebeians. I didn’t tell her that she was part of the reason I’d left publishing and gone on into wine retail and hospitality. I didn’t tell her she was part of the reason I was back, 15 years later.
I was fresh out of college and writing about food and travel for a luxury lifestyle magazine when I moved, in 2008, to New York City for an editorial job. I’d planned, hopefully, to leverage that into an eventual position at Gourmet (where Ruth was Editor-in-Chief). But it was 2008. And the magazine I was working for quickly folded. And then Gourmet folded. I went from being paid to eat out at Manhattan’s best and fanciest new restaurants to borrowing money from a friend for groceries. I needed work. Any work.
I took a freelance recipe copyeditor gig at Martha Stewart Living, dragging myself from East Williamsburg way out across Manhattan to 601 West 26th Street—past 11th Avenue—by 7:30am. I’d work through lunch and clock out at 3pm so I could speed walk east to Avenue C, where I had to open Alphabet City Wine Co. by 4pm. Walking was generally faster than relying on the odd combination of crosstown buses and L train timing needed to get there, but most days, I had to literally run past Temperance Fountain to make it on time.
This was Avenue C in 2008, so usually I had to hose bodily fluids off the front steps of the shop before checking in the day’s deliveries: cases of Uruguayan Tannat and Cru Bourgeois Bordeaux, or Cirò from Calabria and Torrontès from Salta. I wanted to learn about wine so that I could add it to my writing repertoire, and the owners were happy to teach me. They let me borrow books, I was welcome to sit in on tastings, and they trusted me to run the shop solo most nights before I pulled the rolling shutter down over their storefront at 10pm. I’d shuffle home to eat, sleep for a few hours, shower, and be back to MSLO by 7:30am tomorrow.
I pitched freelance stories where I could, vying for bylines about wine with what I noticed were mostly old white guys. I couldn’t stand the way they talked about my favorite beverage, the way they spoke over their audience, using ostentatious tasting notes like obnoxious overlords. Did they even know what they were talking about, I wondered?
Did I?
“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”
- Theodore Roosevelt
I hated wine writers because they were spectators: pointing out how strong men stumbled and how doers of deeds could have done them better. I did not want to be one of those cold and timid souls who neither knew victory nor defeat.
If I wanted to write about wine, I needed to get in the ring.
So I headed back into restaurants and wine retail (much to my mother’s and my overdue student loan balances’ dismay). In between long, sweaty nights of service and tedious, clumsy days of sales, I read and I studied and I tasted and I spit (usually). I was privileged to get to do so under the tutelage of what I now look back and see were New York’s best and brightest sommeliers. To help me solidify my own learnings, I offered to copy-write for their shops and restaurants and bars, honing my writing craft while also gaining direct insight as to what real life guests actually wanted to buy, to learn about, to hear from salespeople.
Eventually, I had enough experience (and chutzpah) that I decided to open my own wine shop and bar. Then a restaurant. When I got annoyed that women were still facing excessive challenges within the industry, I founded a non-profit to help address that. Finally, I opened a third business. By then, of course, there was no time to write.
I had toiled in the arena for a decade and a half; had pulled my three businesses successfully through a global pandemic; had helped spur change for the face of an entire industry. My face was marred by dust and sweat and blood; I had strived valiantly; I had erred; I had come up short again and again. My feet hurt. My kid missed me. My marriage was suffering. And my deeply creative soul was awash with longing.
I was ready to write.
I realized, at last, that I finally felt qualified to do so.
“I told them that they should be embarrassed about the content in their 60-page food section,” Ruth said, matter of factly. She was sitting onstage with Toni Tipton-Martin, another food storytelling luminary (Toni was the first black woman to serve as food editor at a major newspaper, in 1991 at the Cleveland Plain Dealer), discussing their shared time at the Los Angeles Times in the 1980s and how Ruth had become the paper’s food editor.
“So they asked me to take it over. I said to them, ‘No, I don’t want to do it; I just want you to have someone good do it.’ But they insisted that was me,” Ruth explained. “It was another instance of the world telling me to take a chance.”
So here we are. Fifteen years after bidding adieu to wine writing, I find myself facing another instance of the world telling me to take a chance. I’m back—and fully loaded with what I can nearly guarantee is more boots-on-the-ground, blood-sweat-and-dust-marred, daring greatly insight than almost anyone else writing about wine right now. Come at me.
Toni closed out the Symposium’s keynote address with an observation and a rallying call: “Risk taking matters. Your authentic feelings matter. That is your voice. Hold tight to it in the face of all you do.”
I’m a wine writer. Who hates wine writers.
Maybe, through this work, I can change that perspective… if for no one else, at least for me.
Old white guy here. Entirely with you on everything you said about wine writing.
I’m a sommelier who hates journos and most other somms, but you know this