The World Wine Web

According to The Wine Institute, wine consumption in the U.S. has risen steadily since 1991, and with that the number of wine bloggers. Social media has without a doubt broadened the conversations around the digital wine bin, however, it’s questionable that blogging, tweeting and facebooking about wine has democratized wine writing in a way that’s helpful as Mike Steinberger stated in a recent Slate.com piece. Do a glut of wine blogs represent true democracy or are they just clouding up the credible writing and debate like sediment from a 1960s Port?

Gary Vee’s version of speed dating: speed tasting. Video: Youtube

D.C.-based Allison Aitken’s wine blog “A Glass After Work” is typical of the 133,000,000 English-language  blogs that exist on the Internet today. Like 65% of her fellow bloggers she uses her blog as an outlet to explore her passion, which for Aitken is all things oeno. Her blog is primarily musings about tasting notes peppered with tidbits about her personal life and press outings around town.  Certainly she embodies the way social media such as blogging, twittering and facebooking has brought more folks to the wine conversation.

Tyler Colman, aka Dr. Vino (drvino.com), agrees that social media has not only wrested wine writing from legacy publications such as Robert M. Parker, Jr.’s The Wine Advocate, and other glossies such as The Wine Spectator and Decanter, but that this trend is in fact a good one. “Previously, many aspects of wine appreciation were too often taken as given; today, they are much for discussed and contested. Consumers are more savvy, ” said Colman in an e-mail. He also points to the rise of wine blogs like cellartracker.com that boast record levels of readership and in April of this year achieved 1,000,000 consumer tasting notes on its site.

Hardy Wallace blogs, tweets and facebooks about wine like it was his job, because  unlike most bloggers, it actually is his day job.  As Director of Social Media at Murphy-Goode Winery in Healdsburg, Calif. (and the agent provacateur behind dirtysouthwine.com), he owes his current position to the rough and tumble, wild west nature of social media. Though Murphy-Goode is not a particularly stuffy wine producer steeped in Old World ceremony, the winery wanted to reach consumers that comprise the next generation of wine drinkers, and needed someone like Wallace to show them how it’s done.

The ability to blog about wine is as much a tool to reach Generation Y as it is a unique mechanism to keep discussions organic in Wallace’s opinion. His recent blog post featuring Thanksgiving wine recommendations eschewed the traditional Pinot Noir pairings that bulk up lists from editorial staff that may or may not have even tasted themselves at print publications . As a blogger he’s not subject to deadlines that are telegraphed far into the future, and tasted the wines days before he blogged about them. “A lot of people in the print world did their Thanksgiving wines in July,” he says. “Blogging is hot, it’s now, it’s raw.”

Video:Youtube  Hardy Wallace exploits new media to bring a wider audience to fine food and wine.

Wallace writes with an irreverent voice (although he calls it “entertaining”) and exists in a Rebalaisan wine world orchestrating carnavalesque contests of wine pairings with savory victuals such as Popeye’s Fried Chicken and Francois Pinon Vouvray Brut Non-Dosé, a selection from importer Louis/Dressner and contest winner. The next post however finds Wallace at Thomas Keller’s temple of fine dining gastronomy, and he most certainly did not enjoy fried chicken that evening.

And while wine writing has long been thought of as an impenetrable fortress of prose thanks in part to abstract descriptions of fermented grape juice that have long been described much like some people describe ex-lovers: slutty, mischevious, daring, Wallace’s readership is indicative of a snarkier cork dork set. Indeed one member of his dirtysouthwine blog  referred to her Thanksgiving wine pick as “bad-a*s pimp juice.”

It would be easy to dismiss Wallace as a hokey Cinderella social media story, an amateur oenophile making good (pardon the pun) by procuring a dream job at a winery just by shooting some video. But Wallace is in fact an accredited sommelier, a certification that your typical wine blogger is not apt to possess.  And the Thanksgiving wine post wasn’t ruminations on just a few bottles of this and that, he was part of a group that tried 50 bottles blind with all of the Thanksgiving trimmings, so he actually knew what he was writing about as far as not recommending a tried and true staple, Pinot Noir. Though he readily admits he is not a journalist, he is a credible witness to the social media wine story. “Most people in the blog world don’t have an editor, it’s coming to you unfiltered without another look. It’s kind of shooting from the hip,” says Wallace.

Alice Feiring Image: mydailywine.com

But has the ability to tap into the upstart energy of the social media left wine writing somehow degraded? “It’s gossipy, but it’s not journalism,” says Alice Feiring, a New York-based wine writer who is revered not only for her journalistic integrity in regards to wine writing, but also a smart nose and palate.  “There’s no journalistic standard. People come to wine media because they like to drink. Very few have any qualifying reason for having an opinion,” she says.

Before the avalanche of wine blogs Feiring says that wine journalism was poised to become as rich and varied as food writing. The demand for finding out the story behind the story has changed, however, with ad infinitum oenoblogs about the last thing so and so drank, and speed tastings on youtube a la Gary Vaynerchuk’s winelibrarytv.com.  Indeed she actually laments that she gets more hits on her Web site, alicefiering.com, when she does wine reviews.

Though it’s not her job, using social media is a necessity of her profession. “Do I blog and tweet to keep my profile raised? Yes!” she says.

Beyond that though, Feiring sees little use for serious wine drinkers and wine writers to lay themselves bare to the almighty Internet.

“There is something that is transitory about new media,” she says. The immediacy of social networking tools has widened the circle of those who come to the wine conversation but it’s not so much democratic as dumbed down for Feiring because “very few people take what they read with several grains of salt.” She also doesn’t envision people who are still interested in status bottles heading to the Internet to find out what the run-of-the-mill blogger has to say about a grand cru Burgundy (this is also due to the fact that a common blogger probably doesn’t have access to status bottles, either).

Though Feiring is representative of a more traditional style of journalism, she has used the Web to lob grenades at the establishment with blog posts such as “The Elusive Californian Terroir,” but it is her print work that has caused the most controversy, notably her book, The Battle for Wine and Love or How I Saved the World from Parkerization (Robert Parker being the poster boy for what Feiring calls the “one world, one taste phenomena”). “Print is going away but I think it still carries the most respect,” she says.

–Amy