Blind Muscat's Cellarbook

The Moleskine® Cult

At a recent lunch and tasting sponsored by an ambitious and well-heeled winery, the 20 or so writers in attendance were all presented with a personalized gift, a small, hardbound blank notebook, about 3-1/2” by 5-1/2”, embossed on the cover with the winery logo.  It didn’t register much with me, but all around me, people were giving off sounds of delight—“Oh, cool, a mole skin.”

“A what?” I asked. “A mole skin, you know, one of those great little notebooks—I use them all the time,” came several responses almost in unison. ”Uh, okay,” I said.

I knew immediately I had stumbled across a cult.

Guns, Wine and Liability

Sunday I spent my afternoon at the annual Rhone Rangers tasting at Fort Mason in San Francisco. There was a lot of good wine (especially among the whites), the usual overdone wines (especially the Syrahs), and I had an OK time.

But it wasn’t the same—because I couldn’t pour my own wine this year.

2005 Coltibuono Chianti Classico

Once upon a time, before the Chardonnay craze, the Cabernet Sauvignon craze, the Merlot craze, and the current Pi9not Noir craze, there was Chianti. With or without the straw-covered fiasco packaging, it was everywhere, the wine most likely to be encountered and ordered on wine lists across the country. Besides being cheap (single digits for really good ones through the 1980s) and plentiful, Chianti was much-believed because it was so versatile at the table. It went with everything from sole to steak, soup to nuts. Medium body, modest alcohol, refreshing acidity, dry finish—and you could take the bottle home and stick a candle in it. Along with dry rosé and pre-steroidal Zinfandel, it was a perennial go-to wine.

Two or three wine revolutions later, the fanciest estate-grown, Riserva Chiantis are priced somewhere in the $30-$40 range, no longer everyday wine in my marginal tax bracket.

The Future of Wine Writing, Part Three

This rambling, triple-tiered speculation about wine and words started with the observation that any discussion of the future of wine writing should properly start with considering its content, not its technological delivery vehicle, and noted some topic areas clearly suited for the digital sphere. Then we moved on to consider whether there are any Big Ideas left to discuss in the wine world. and listed several—global warming, emerging wine regions, the import squeeze on US wines, sustainability, truth in labeling, and the demise of the traditional model of vertically integrated winemaking—the same person/family grows the grapes, makes the wine, brings the wine to market. If these are among the Big Ideas of the future, where and how do they and their large intellectual ilk get examined?

The Future of Wine Writing, Part Two

The first panel of this triptych on the future of wine writing took a look (and some swipes) at what are by far the most popular, frequent types of content: wine reviews and ratings, winery and regional profiles, and tips on food and wine pairing. All of these categories should find their natural home on the web, and are indeed headed just that way. But what about Big Ideas in the world of wine: are there any such things, and if so, what’s the proper place to write about them?

I can think of at least half a dozen issues facing winedom that are meatier than a Syrah from the Northern Rhone. Taken together, they presage an unprecedented era of change, yea even tumult, in wine-as-we-have-come-to-know-it, and they are likely to be a major part of the substance of serious wine writing in the next few decades.

The Future of Wine Writing, Part One

Of all the sessions at the recent Symposium for Professional Wine Writers in Napa, the most interesting and contentious (the latter helping explain the former) focused on something called Media Convergence, the proliferation of digital outlets for wine writing—web sites, blogs, podcasts, internet TV, etc.—and their impact on more traditional print media—newspapers, magazines and books. Given that new outlets are popping up everywhere, I might have called it Media Divergence, but in any case, it’s clear that the landscape for wine writers is changing rapidly and permanently.

The panel was chaired by Vinography blogger Alder Yarrow and included Brett Anderson, head of editorial development for CurtcoMedia (which includes the plutocrat lifestyle-oriented Robb Report); Linda Murphy, former managing editor for WineToday.com, now writing for several prominent magazines and web outlets; Elaine Marshall, wine director for the Sunset magazine wine club; and Laura Levy Shatkin, a developer of Wine Taste TV and producer of the “Taste” local TV show in Chicago.

Yarrow opened the festivities with an intentional provocation: ”Print is dead.”