Part
4
The
failure of the wine press
This section puts me in a difficult position. I’m very much
a beginner in the field of wine journalism, and I’m reluctant to
write what could be seen to be an attack on fellow members of the
Circle of Wine Writers, many of whom are much better writers than I am
and almost all of whom have far more experience than I do. But what
I’m about to say needs to be said, and so I apologise in advance to
those who feel stung by it. It is not meant personally. Here goes…
The wine press, by and large, have failed to speak out
against the soulless uniformity of branded wines. There are
exceptions, such as Andrew Jefford and Tim Atkin, but the majority of journalists and publications have been so overawed by the
economic power, prevalence and success of the brands that they have
joined in with uncritical applause. They are like the neutrals at a
sporting event who wait to see which way the game is going before
deciding which team to cheer for. There are very few in the wine press
who are prepared to plough their own furrow and go out on a limb alone
(forgive the awful mixed metaphors here); the press tend to hunt in
packs with an eye on who else is recommending what. We’ve therefore
ended up in the dreadful situation where the very people who should
have been protecting consumers from the dreadful blandness and
uniformity of branded wines have betrayed their readers and been busy
promoting these soulless brands with gusto.
Newspaper wine columns seem to be a threatened species at the
moment. There are several reasons for this, but perhaps one of the
contributing factors is that the newspaper wine hacks have done
themselves out of a job. By and large they’ve been supportive of
wine brands. In an attempt to appeal to a wide audience their
recommendations have been largely restricted to inexpensive, widely
available wines: they are targeted deliberately at a ‘general’
audience. But are general readers interested in reading about
uninteresting branded wines? If that’s all they are looking for they
hardly need to read a wine column. Branded wines fill the supermarket
shelves: if you want a taste-alike Chardonnay for around £5 the best
advice is probably to see what’s on special at the gondola end of
your local supermarket wine display. If all newspaper wine columns are
doing is telling you where to buy dull-but-safe wine at discount,
it’s akin to a travel writer focusing solely on package holidays at
Mediterranean beach resorts. No wonder they’re being axed.
But let's try to be even handed. This difficulty with
newspaper wine columns may simply reflect deficiencies in the genre of
communication. If anyone is attempting to communicate wine to a
general audience, they have to make what they say accessible to people
without specialist knowledge, and if they are going to recommend
wines, it helps if those wines are generally available. So it could be
that anyone writing a newspaper wine column is forced into a bit of a
corner, and what we see is skilled professionals trying to do their
best job with a rather difficult set of constraints forced upon them.
See also
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November 2002
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