Henry wonders why wine writers have such uniquely one-track minds…
There’s an article by Craig Brown (the humourist not the former Scotland football manager) about being present at the one and only meeting between Anthony Burgess and Benny Hill. Apparently it was not a great success. Though the two great artists admired each other’s work they could not find any common ground: Burgess wanted to talk about comedy and Hill wanted to talk about literature. Specialists often want to talk about almost anything else apart from their area of expertise.
This is common in all walks of life except it would seem wine writing. Wine writers only talk about wine. Compare two writers for the Times for example: on the restaurant page Giles Coren pontificates about whatever he feels like with the actual food coming far down his list of priorities whereas Jane McQuitty sticks to recommending wine with not a mention of her hell-raising days at Studio 54*.
I’m not sure how I feel about this. There is a wonderful purity about reading someone who really knows their subject and writes about it to the exclusion of everything else. I like that Tim Atkin et al don’t blether on about their private lives (unless of course they were interestingly scandalous) or use their columns as a platform to opine Archbishop of Canterbury-like on the failures of the Coalition. And God forbid that wine should ever have the Observer Food Monthly treatment with its celebrity lifestyle nonsense. But it does seem odd how wine seems to exist in a bubble cut off from politics, culture and the minutia of everyday life. Occasionally it ventures out to look at global warming, tax rises or a black workers co-op in South Africa but mostly its nose is firmly planted in a glass.
This is fine if you are Jancis Robinson and have a large wine-literate audience to talk to. One of the joys of her website is feeling that you are part of a knowledgeable club. But other mainstream writers have the difficulty of not knowing quite how interested their readers are in what is a complicated subject. Inevitably many fall between two stools: one being too winey for the general reader; the other being not winey enough for the wine bore.
Perhaps newspapers wouldn’t be cutting their wine pages if there was someone who wrote not to impart knowledge and recommend but merely to entertain. After all, who reads AA Gill to decide where to eat?
* This is a joke. To my best knowledge Jane McQuitty never raised hell at Studio 54.
Henry Jeffreys also blogs bibulously at World of Booze, and The Lady.
Would have commented on this post, then I noticed the AA Gill mention, who comments on a post that mentions AA Gill? who never has looked good in long trousers.
Jancis Robinson story…some years ago, after a ‘tasting’ at Valvonas and in a fit of recklessness, I ordered a case of the Itie plonk known as ‘Where the Dreams Have no End’, unexpectedly away on business and unable to collect, when I finally turned up at the Leith Walk shop the bloke said, “oh, Jancis was here, she bought it”, Jancis effing who? I thought. Bloody stuff wasn’t much cop anyhow, tasted like PVC granules.
Giles Coren is a writer? Blimey.
good story Malty!
And there’s plenty of good writers who you imagine would be good at writing about wine – clive james for example
Actually, I’d love to see a full Jonathan Meades programme on wine – has he done one?
That would be something Worm, standing on a windswept Moselle hillside, wayfarers firmly on beak, soliloquizing about terroir and stuff whilst glugging from a bottle of Früh.
yes you can picture it very easily can’t you. Meades standing in the middle of row after row of vines, arms by sides, barking out the word ‘terroir’ and saying things about australian wine being the ‘oaked-chipped opium of the moben-kitchened masses’ or something
I’d love to see Jonathan Meades on wine or even just a bit drunk.
I wouldn’t like to see him on a dancefloor though
He would simply stand stock still in a suit while all around gyrated trivally.
Bruce Anderson in the back of the Spectator does wander off-piste/pissed in his fortnightly booze columns, normally something about famous toffs with whom he has hunted the fox.
He alternates with Tanya Gold’s restaurant reviews, of course, which have become parodies of themselves they’re so obscure.
T.Gold was the guardian’s token ‘self-loathing single bird bridget jones-ey columnist’, so it is a bit of a puzzle as to how she landed the speccie job, although outwardly she does at least look like she enjoys her food
The ins and outs of the crushed grape trade are the least of the Spectators worries at present, Poor old Fraser Nelson has become a naysayer of the nats, calling down upon the papers head the wrath of Khan, letter bombs primed with bangers and shortbread are winging their way south as we type. Rumours abound of a similar fate to that of the Sun / Liverpool.
“someone who wrote not to impart knowledge and recommend but merely to entertain”
Sorry to discover this post a couple of weeks later, but may we humbly offer…ourselves?
The Sediment Blog – two gentlemen facing their mid-life terroirs