Meg Maker explores the differences between educating yourself in wine, and training yourself as a writer.
I’ve been rummaging through older wine writing, material from 50 or 60 years ago, trying make sense of our craft’s recent history. It’s been fun. I’ve stumbled onto tasting notes from the year I was born. I’ve been reminded of great personalities, like Lalou Bize-Leroy, Becky Wasserman, and Ann Noble. I’ve chuckled at a writer’s ‘discovery’ of Oregon Pinot Noir. Yet many questions arising from these yellowed pages feel fresh, eerily contemporary: Is this wine ‘alive’ or deadened by sulfite? Is my son’s generation improving or ruining the legacy of my domaine? Where will we find customers in an uncertain economy?
The writers from that era were somewhat homogeneous: British or American, white, well educated, mostly male. They were writers first, cultural commentators second, wine writers distant third. Circle founder Cyril Ray was a war correspondent, travel writer, and military historian before meandering toward wine. Frank Schoonmaker was also a travel writer, then wine merchant. Hugh Johnson initially wrote features about travel and food. Frank J. Prial was likewise a feature writer before inaugurating the New York Times’s wine column, in 1972 (from which he retired in 2005). Jancis Robinson started in the travel business, because “at that time the subjects of food and wine were regarded as irredeemably frivolous,” she has written; wine wasn’t a suitably serious pursuit for a woman who’d just earned a Master’s in Maths and Philosophy.
Several of the British writers had fallen in love with wine at university, specifically Oxford and Cambridge, whose excellent wine societies fostered both conviviality and wine knowledge (we have them to thank for inoculating Robinson and Johnson). But formal wine training wasn’t seen as an urgent requirement for wine writers back then. That’s partly because it was almost entirely unavailable. The Wine and Spirit Education Trust launched in the UK in 1969, and its courses and certifications crept abroad slowly, gaining global foothold only the 1990s. The timeline of the Court of Master Sommeliers is similar. Robinson was the first person outside of the wine trade to earn a Master of Wine, in 1984; in this (and many more ways) she was exceptional.
Instead, the notable wine writers earned readers’ trust thanks to journalistic ethics, clarity of vision, commitment to the work, and distinctive and engaging voices. They were at the forefront of a burgeoning scene, when the world’s wines were getting bottled, shipped, and made more broadly available to the middle class. But their work endures because they were good writers who had something to say, experts at both describing and evaluating the experience of wine.
Today, wine writing has become professionalized, and many novice wine writers feel compelled to pursue formal wine training for credibility. The credentialing organizations have a commercial interest in encouraging this approach, and to be fair do a thorough job of educating nascent writers about wine history, styles, making, growing, and more, along with furnishing them with tools to describe the world’s wines. But they are not designed to be writing programs; they teach about wine, not wine communication. So new wine writers must, on their own, learn to tackle setting and description, characterization, plot, pacing, texture, dialogue, narrative arc — the myriad formal and informal facets of the craft that make a piece of wine writing (any writing) worth reading.
That skill, writerly expertise, is hard-earned, and it only comes with time. Facts are learnable and discoverable, but the ability to share facts in a compelling way, to use them to say something true, is harder to acquire. You can look up the vineyard area in Aloxe-Corton. You can’t look up how to communicate, persuasively, the impact climate change is having on those vines and its farmers. The former is a fact. The latter is framing.
So yes, learn as much as possible about wine, its viticultural and enological aspects, its social and societal implications and influences. Earn a wine credential if it’s appealing and affordable. But don’t stop there if what you most want to do with your knowledge and insights is share them with others. Learn how to write, then practice that every day.
Photo Credit: Meg Maker