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Celebrating natural wine -- and writing
As with the rest of journalism, there is endless teeth-gnashing about the future of wine writing. That is, if it has a future and isn't subsumed by the joys of the blog world, social media, communal recommendations and mass online wine tastings that would leave the Rev. Sun Myung Moon duly impressed.
It's always important to think about new models. So today is the second day of my joint spare-time project with Wolfgang Weber of Wine & Spirits on our natural wine experiment.
That's not exactly right. More of a natural pizza experiment, with natural wine to wash it down. Wolfgang and I both decided to participate in a celebration of natural wines being run by Cory Cartwright, a San Jose video-game designer for NamcoBandai and lover of vinous esoterica. Cory's "31 Days of Natural Wine" has been running on his Saignee blog since June 19 with a new post each day. It was intended, in part, as an anniversary of his first year of wine blogging. (Chronicle contributor Paul Clarke did something similar with cocktails for his "30/30" project.)
What distinguished Cory's effort was its particular focus: There are lots of one-off discussions of natural wine (let's not ignite yet another discussion about what that term means -- at least not until next week) floating in the blog ether, and occasionally popping their head into print. But rarely is there an extended, or what Herbert Gans might have called "multiperspectival," meditation on the subject.
Cory floated the idea, expecting only bloggers to chip in, but he got a dramatic response. Aside from Wolfgang and myself, there are a handful of other working wine writers, including Alice Feiring (on Muscadet), Peter Liem (on a very special Champagne) and Robert Camuto (on "un-pimped wines").
"I was actually surprised," Cory recalls of when he first starting getting inquiries. "I didn't know a lot of these people even read my blog or had heard about it."
He also got contributions from high-profile wine bloggers like Jeremy Parzen of Do Bianchi (on Vino Nobile de Montepulciano) and Lyle Fass of Rockss and Fruit (on the natural movement in Germany/Austria). But there's also a lively explanation of sulfur in wine from chemist and Burgundy lover Arjun Mendiratta, appreciations of obscure wines from aficionados, like Slaton Lipscomb's take on Carema, and a lyrical consideration of natural wine in Detroit from wineseller Putnam Weekley. One of the best reads is an incendiary post from Terroir (the San Francisco flavor) co-owner Guilhaume Gerard, who offered his "natural wine dogma," which has already sparked flames. (Example: "If you are inoculating your wines, you might as well make a non vintage.")
I wouldn't presume to say this is the best collection of writing on the topic. But Cory has done an impressive job of curating a lot of divergent thoughts from a lot of dedicated and noteworthy people. Did I mention he was doing this all for free? In fact, everyone is doing this for free. That forced a few of us writerly types to break our vow against pro bono writing, but it seemed like a worthy exception.
In fact, it has been a perfect chance to tinker with what my colleague Phil Bronstein likes to call the "pro-am" model of journalism, in which career journalists and unpaid contributors somehow learn to work together. Of course, in this case it was entirely non-monetized, which has been and will continue to be a huge roadblock for the pro-am model. But as a pro-am experiment (though I rather doubt Cory conceived of it as such) it has been compelling to follow.
You can read Day 1 and Day 2 of our pizza/wine odyssey. I won't spoil it, but he and I wanted to explore what it meant to put natural wines in a proper context with food (rather than fetishizing them), and of course since we were drinking wines made without added yeasts, we figured we should do the same for the pizza. Consider it an exploration of San Francisco's dough terroir.
"31 Days" ain't over yet. And natural wines are likely to get more local focus in the next couple months. Local retailers and restaurants are talking about doing a Natural Wine Week. And John Locke, formerly of Bonny Doon (which, in the course of this project, inaugurated Cory into the confrerie of wine-sample recipients), is serving an all-biodynamic list of wines by the glass this month at the Santa Cruz wine bar Soif.
Take a moment to read through some of the "31 Days" posts. This may not be the right model, but there's far more to provoke discussion and debate than you're likely to find in a mountain of tasting notes.
| July 17 2009 at 10:15 AM
Twitters and blog awards
Just so no one accuses me of burying the lead -- assuming you think this is a lead -- I have finally broken one of my longtime pledges. I now Twitter. Find me at: http://twitter.com/jbonne.
Profundity I can't promise, but at long last you'll know what I ate for dinner. Maybe.
And I am ashamed to admit, after years of railing against Twitter as ruining reasoned discourse, that it's a medium perfectly attuned to my attention span. Also, it beats paying for cable.
Now to all that old, retrograde media, by which I mean blogs. It's time once again for the American Wine Blog Awards, and this year marks a bit of a shift. Tom Wark of the blog Fermentation, who has run the awards for the past several years -- I think, lordy, since the last time I blogged -- is passing the torch to the OpenWine Consortium.
A lot of this is probably as simple as moving from a blog honoring a blog(s), an honorable but self-referential mode, to a social media model, which makes utter sense. Tom describes his hosting them as "an incubation period," so perhaps they will find a good footing and evolve. This needs happen to all Web awards -- witness the evolution of the Webbys, which found stability after a brief Icarus-like start. And evolution is kind of necessary, seeing as the very prospect of wine blogging these days is so knotted up in a morass of for-free writing, for-pay writing, journalism, not-quite-journalism, drunken rants and gorgeous insight that clarity, and organization, would be helpful.
And evolution happens. Need you more evidence than the American Squirrel Wine Blog Awards, which not only has managed to finally give due to such crucial topics as "Best Boldface Names" (Brooklynguy) but also manages to honor importer Joe Dressner with the "Steven Spielberg Lifetime Achievement Award for 8 Years of Blogging." (8 is a bit ridiculous, but if you haven't been reading Joe's latest, The Amazing Misadventures of Captain Tumor Man, it's a shanda on you.) And needless to say, Fermentation won a Squirrel for "Best and Most Brilliant use of Blog Contest to get Other Bloggers to Direct Traffic to his Blog." Congrats to all the winners. We'll be toasting you with our finest California Champagne. Or sparkling Erbaluce. Your choice.
Meantime, if you haven't gotten to this year's old-school Wine Blog Awards, go vote now. You've got until tomorrow. The nominees include some familiar, perennial choices, along with very worthy new names who, I can say in nothing approaching an objective way, also have lent their writing talents to The Chronicle. Go vote.
| March 03 2009 at 09:30 AM
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