Wine writers discover they have feelings and write thousands of words about it
Three wine critics have independently realised that drinking wine produces emotions, a breakthrough they collectively explored at extreme length, as Alfonso Cevola observes. Instead of simply writing better about wine, they wrote thousands of words about why writing about wine is hard.
Terry Theise, who describes wine as “an equal being” (which is slightly concerning), spent most of his conversation with Meg Maker explaining that he can’t taste more than 20 wines in a row without his palate getting “befuddled.” He said this as if it were a revelation and not just what happens to every human with a mouth. When asked if he’d ever considered just… not tasting 20 wines in a row, he looked confused and said something about “professional obligations.”
Meg Maker, who has definitely corrected someone’s pronunciation of “Gevrey-Chambertin” at a party, agreed enthusiastically. She wants to taste the same wine five times over a month before writing about it, which sounds less like journalism and more like the sort of relationship your friends beg you to leave. “It just feels wrong to write about a wine after one encounter,” she said, somehow making wine tasting sound like dating a narcissist.
Sweeping the carport
Then there’s Bodhi Landa, who, in response to Theise and Maker’s piece, wrote a whole essay about having a revelation whilst sweeping his carport hungover. The revelation was: wine is like music, and he’d read about matrices once. “When you add new data to the matrix, it changes all the existing data,” he explained, as if he’d just invented the concept of “learning things over time.”
The most relatable moment came when Maker admitted she rarely has transcendent wine experiences anymore, which “breaks her heart.” I sympathise entirely. My version is standing in the wine shop trying to remember if the £15 Côtes du Rhône was the good one or the one that tasted like Band-Aids.
Tasting notes are bad, except when they pay the bills
All three emphasised that tasting notes are “dishonest,” “reductive,” and “miss the point” of wine, which is why they continue to write them for money. “I write them because editors demand them,” Maker explained, with the same energy as someone saying, “I only did it because he asked me to.”
Theise said he won’t use the word “otiose” anymore because it makes him feel “twee.” He actually said this to another person. “Otiose” means “serving no practical purpose,” which is a rather apt description of meta-commentary about wine writing that does nothing to improve wine writing—though perhaps he should reconsider the word on those grounds alone.
The thesis, as far as I can tell, is this: Wine writing should be more personal, more subjective, more experiential—but also rigorous, but also literary, but also not pretentious, but also worth saving, but also not self-indulgent. Basically, wine writing should be exactly like their wine writing and not like anyone else’s wine writing. They want to produce work that’s “worth keeping,” which is admirable, except they’ve produced 9,000 words of disposable discourse about wine writing rather than wine writing itself. It’s like complaining that restaurants serve bad food—and then opening one that only serves menus.
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Unnecessary frameworks
Meanwhile, Landa inked out a whole section about watching a Kenneth Lonergan film, because apparently, we’re supposed to believe that understanding a Barolo requires first understanding a three-hour film about urban trauma. “I probably would not have loved this film when it came out in 2011,” he wrote. Fair enough—most of us needed a few years of drinking wine before we could appreciate certain things. Though one might also observe that in 2011, Landa’s “matrix” presumably contained less data, which, according to his own theory, should have made the film feel more seismic, not less. But let’s not apply his framework too rigorously.
The kicker is they’re all rather right. Tasting notes ARE often rubbish. Wine writing IS frequently boring. The press trip industrial complex IS absurd. But instead of simply writing better, they wrote thousands of words explaining why everyone else is writing worse, which is itself a contribution to the very problem they diagnose.
It’s somewhat like watching three people independently discover that Tinder is awful and then spending an hour explaining their personal philosophies about dating, whilst all still actively swiping left.
An accidentally perfect summary
At one point, Theise said, “I don’t think any human being is talented or smart enough to do a proper evaluation of wines under those circumstances.” He was talking about tasting 50 wines, but he could just as easily have been talking about this entire conversation.
The only person who came out looking good was Hugh Johnson, who apparently once got criticised for “never saying what the wine tastes like, only what it was like to drink it.” Theise defended him by saying “that there is the point!”
And here’s the lovely irony: Hugh Johnson never needed to write 7,000 words defending his approach. He simply wrote well enough that his approach defended itself. He didn’t theorise about wine writing being “worth keeping”—he just kept it. His work is still read decades later, not because he explained why it should be, but because it actually is.
Meanwhile, I’m still standing in the wine shop trying to work out whether “slate, apple, and lime” tells me anything useful. Perhaps I’ll just go with the one that got 95 points.
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