Good Grape: A Wine Blog Manifesto

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July 2 2008

Vin de Napkin - Naughty Nurse

On the heels of this announcement from White Rocket Wine Company, I can’t let a chance to comment about “French Maid” wine and a press release headline that includes the phrase, “Ooh La La!” go unchecked.

It’s no wonder the French hate us “Ugly Americans.” Whatever the good folks at White Rocket are spending on focus groups, please break me off a slice and I’ll brainstorm label names for you.

$500 out of my pocket to the first wine company that releases a wine called, ‘Chuck Norris.’

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June 27 2008

Final Thoughts (For Now) on the Wine Blogging Review Coalition

Earlier this week I wrote two posts about starting a Wine Blogger Review Coalition—a cooperatively managed wine review site with sponsorship.

I received a great deal of feedback, all of it good; some of it was thought provoking and some of the feedback was dissenting. However, all of the feedback was constructive.

Having open dialogue and debate is the cornerstone of the blogosphere--the wine blogosphere and any niche area.

That said, nothing was ever accomplished in a committee meeting—the blessing and the curse of the blogosphere.

Therefore, in full disclosure and transparency, I will say that I think the ideas as I have laid them out and in probably a zillion and one permutations, have viability, but, the devil, as they say, is in the details.

Lest anybody paint me with the black brush of puffery without performance, I am going to go underground on this for likely the bulk of the summer with the goal to have the plan sketched out in time for the Wine Blogger Conference, and perhaps more.

I may be contacting some of you as a sounding board, and I may post with more formal thoughts mid-stream, but my overall notion is to not have this be a group hug, at least not now.

I do not have a problem with trying something and failing, but I do have a problem with talking about something and not even trying. Do I think this Wine Blogger Review Coalition *can* work? Yes, I do. Do I know it will work? No, I do not.

However, I am going to try. And, I’m going to guess that between the OWC, Wine 2.0 and the Wine Business Network on LinkedIN that I manage, I’ll be able to fail in a heap of flames, or not. And, if failure is the order of the day, the only person that will be out of any material time and/or resources will be me.

Here is what you can expect, though. When I revisit this, it will be a fully baked plan with at least “out of the gate” support and it will have been vetted by a team of bloggers who have either volunteered to vet it, or whom I trust, one of the two. It will also, likely, have enough branding behind it to make it interesting and compelling. And, of course, finally, it will be a cooperative based format—administered by bloggers and not an entity that I will own.

So, stay tuned, and if you want to be a part of the “kitchen cabinet” and provide feedback throughout the stream of my consciousness and the germination process, please send me an email at jlefevere indy.rr.com

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June 26 2008

Vin de Napkin - The Soothsayer

I feel bad for Dan Berger. The guy is cranking out darn near 4000 words and it appears that he’s not getting any editorial support whatsoever.

Paging an editor, please!

I’m referencing this article at Appellation America.

I don’t mean to be mean-spirited, vindictive, or even hint at being anything other than pleasantly delicate. That said, I had to take a drink in order to see if the following paragraph would become clearer to me, Papa Hemingway style:

This kind of wine is part of the Third Wave that is making an end run around the scorers, avoiding being placed into a numerical box from which it’s nearly impossible to escape. True, some of the wines might be mainstream enough to be rated, but most wine makers who make such wines do not want to risk being at the mercy of palates ill-equipped to make appropriate decisions that can have a life-or-death sort of aftertaste.

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June 23 2008

More Thoughts on the Wine Blogging Review Coalition

The Wine Blogging Review Coalition (WBRC) is dead simple, and it need not be anything more than that, at least now.

After receiving insightful comments on the post I wrote yesterday about the idea of creating a cooperative form of wine reviewing, I think it might aid the conversation if I expand a bit.

Actually, I think what I want to do is contract a bit, because it is more helpful to say what the Wine Blogging Review Coalition IS NOT (at least as I have imagined it), more so than what it is.

1) The WBRC is not about certification by its participants; though, I think certification is important for reasons that I will explain.

2) The WBRC is not something that is intended to address individual credibility and integrity. This is not a zero sum game where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. The WBRC is a vehicle that rides shotgun with our individual endeavors, with an eye on the future.

3) The WBRC is not for Steve Heimoff who has a gig with Wine Enthusiast thankyouverymuch. And, I should note that I think Heimoff and Matt Kramer are two of the more erudite wine writers in the US write now. So, no offense, Steve.

4) The WBRC is not trying to drive any type of standard or consolidation for wine bloggers—I am completely happy with beautiful chaos.

5) The WBRC is not something I’m committed to do unless I have a coalition of the willing (mercy on my soul for the colloquial political reference)

Here is what the WBRC is and the problem(s) it solves, but first, just a bit of context:

Wine Blogging is like a Boy Scout troop where every 12-year-old kid in the troop wants to be an Eagle Scout. We are all Chief with no Indians. This would be fine if we were talking about knitting at the sewing circle, but wine is one of the hottest consumer categories in the country right now. We are stronger together, then individually.

Somehow, we have to get over our individual Id and coalesce around the pack leader. I am not saying I am the Pack Leader; there are others more suited who are working on their Eagle Scout badges, if that makes sense. Absent leadership, somebody has to step up, though.

That said, many have noted that wine blogging does incent purchase activity. We know that all three tiers of the wine industry read blogs, we know that wineries are increasingly viewing bloggers as influential and that wine blogs are predominantly read by a very small collective audience that wield influence greater than their size. We know that wine sales are happening at a rapid rate online; we know that people buy wine at retail by the point. All of these things are acknowledged truths.

So, what is wrong with lining up your centerfielder to shade towards left field if you know you have a right-handed pull hitter at the plate?

What wine blogs are not (and lets be real here), are a credible vehicle in mainstream wine culture. It is a simple fact.

God bless Alder at Vinography or Gary Vaynerchuk, but their micro-influence does not even begin to compete with Parker or the Wine Spectator, at least not yet. Any one of my wine-loving friends that buy futures and Silver Oak and have cellars do not know and do not give a rip about wine bloggers. There are many of these people—many more than the people that “get” wine blogging.

Now, I am not talking about trying to boil the ocean here, what I am suggesting is a simple start on a path to greater legitimacy. In addition, again, this is not about my palate versus your palate who has chops and who does not, this is bigger than next month especially if you buy into the future and the democratization of content.

In my humble opinion, a wine blog review cooperative with some baseline of standards is a healthy start to creating a vehicle that can act as a legitimate fourth estate in wine reviews.

The Wine Blogging Review Coalition is:

1) Very similar to Wine Blogging Wednesday with the following differences:

* Wines are provided as samples
* Review participants are limited
* The site is sponsored
* There is an under-current of capitalism because the site is sponsored and the blog reviewers receive stipends

2)The WBRC is a way to start to build some collaboration with a small set of bloggers who review wines using a standardized language—be that stars, be that points, be that word count, whatever …

3) The WBRC is a way to aggregate content and reviews for wineries and associations that do not get frequent reviews otherwise …

4) The WBRC is a way to aggregate content and reviews for retailers who would like to merchandise and the wineries that would like for them to merchandise.

5) The WBRC is a way to save foolish advertising spends by international organizations and associations that are spending money in ways that can yield better results.

6) The WBRC is an entry-point to help tame blogging and social media for the uninitiated

7) The WBRC reviewers have a baseline of credibility with a minimum certification from a governing body; a certification that most wine bloggers could pass with little challenge. And, I would add, based on a separate conversation string, that WBRC reviews follow some form of journalistic guidelines for integrity and ethics.

8) The WBRC is a way for bloggers to earn a stipend for their work, while working with complete independent editorial voice

9) The WBRC is owned by no own, it is a cooperative “owned” by the participants.

So, that is the gist, with full transparency, over two posts and about two thousand words. Please add additional comment, as I have provided more context. My next step, depending on what the comments bring is to do a visual schematic and invite more participation.

Thanks for reading Good Grape!

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May 15 2008

The Wine Trials

Published on May 1st and just delivered to my doorstep via Amazon.com, The Wine Trials by Robin Goldstein enlivened (inflamed?) the wine blogosphere before anybody cracked the cover.

The striker to the matchbook? Eric Asimov, a seasoned journalist for the New York Times, wrote a post based on reading a Newsweek article about the book.

You would not expect a journalist to comment on another piece of print media, especially without having read the book, but I guess this is the blogosphere and we are all guilty of seeking inspiration outside of traditional journalistic boundaries, but what ensued in the comments section of the post when nobody had read the book was truly sociologically interesting.

After a 65 comment explosion, Asimov wrote a follow-up after receiving a pre-release galley copy of the book and that post incited 31 comments.

Sequentially, the original post can be found here and the follow-up here.

Interestingly, the book is only, initially, available on Amazon.com. And, yes, you guessed it. Amazon is currently backordered on the book.

Somebody is interested …

Piqued by all of this, I did what anybody would do with all of that content on Asimov’s blog—I cut and paste into a Word document with .5 margins and 10 pt Trebuchet font.

36 pages and 17,000 words later I am more confused than before I started. And, with no small amount of irony, the 17,000 words has to exceed the actual content in the book, which is 2/3’s wine listings.

Here is the net-net version with this book: the author did a blind tasting of many wines with large number of tasters (some 500 +) and the result was that numerous inexpensive wines (under $15) bested wines that are more expensive ($50 +) based on the panel of judges.

Pragmatically speaking, you do not have a book if people preferred more expensive wines to the less expensive wines so there is some room for question because the study, presumably, was set-up with an end conclusion in mind and not a hypothesis, but just the same it’s a fascinating book that makes for good arm chair reading over the course of a couple of hours. With 58 introductory pages and the balance of the book being wine listings of the 100 wines under $15 that bested the $50 - $150 wines, it’s a light read.

The majority of the blog comments about Asimov’ posts on the book were centered on the division of small expensive wines and large grocery store wines. This is an old ideological argument and more analogies were employed to explain the difference in art versus culture. Variants cropped up about wine appreciation versus simpleton quaffers, etc.

Ugh, wake me when this tired old song is over with. We get it. Get over it. Yes, there is a cultural difference between NASCAR fans and those that attend the symphony. By God, both of these groups of people enjoy wine, too.

Nested within all of this debate is the essential truth by Asimov.

He states:

I am not saying wine is the equivalent of art. I do say that wine can be appreciated on many different levels, but that nobody should ever feel obliged to appreciate wine on any level. In the end, the book seems to divide wine consumers into the casual buyers who are pushed this way and that by forces they don’t understand, and the wealthy conspicuous status seekers who also are not quite aware of capitalism and marketing. Unacknowledged are the serious wine lovers who are knowledgeable, experimental and passionate, and who, yes, are in control of their own destinies. The book may speak to the first two groups, but not to the third.

As a member of the third group, the “serious wine lover” I can say unequivocally that I occasionally drink inexpensive wine and, natch, this book is an interesting take and a welcome addition to the pantheon of wine studies and a nice guidebook to the maze of choices at your grocery store for a through the week glass.

For additional reading at the source research study that led to the book, see this white paper.

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