This week we will announce the inaugural winner of the Hawke’s Bay Writing Scholarship. A few folks on the HB Winegrowers’ Board reached out to me back in winter to help develop this as a way to nurture local writing talent. I hopped on the opportunity. This is because I feel strongly that, like in many industries and across many social issues, strong journalism is in high demand. I also saw it as a great way to help promote the local industry by developing talent each year and having them assist with providing content, of which the world seems to have a never ending need.
When I was first getting into wine, in a more serious and professional matter, back in the early 2000s, I was voracious in my reading. Any article I could find on a rare Italian grape, that small region in Southwest France or the history of Argentine Malbec, I was sure to gobble up. If it was well written, I was coming back for more. But at that time, wine writers were few and far between and almost mysterious. I read a bit of Jancis Robinson back then, even though she was hard to find. And with it still being the relatively early days of the internet, there just wasn’t that much online. I remember a friend giving me ‘The New York Times Book of Wine’ (a book I still have), published in 1976. That was a real treat. It has an entire section on wine etiquette and putting on a wine tasting. Quite fancy indeed! But it did go through important regions in France, Italy and Germany and even mentioned Californian wine a bit. Seems like such an innocent time.
Nowadays there’s no shortage of wine content out there. I wonder sometimes if we’re in an echo chamber and hardly anything gets out to the wine consumer, the wine lover and the curious kid like me who found something they were passionate about and dove in deep. It all sort of changed about 15 years ago when the wine blogging world and the blog itself began to get very popular. Suddenly there were independent writers around the world writing about their favourite wines with tens of thousands in their audience.
Back in the olden days of 2011 I attended, on the advice of a very smart marketing person, the 4th Annual Wine Bloggers Conference where I was officially launching my Decibel Wines for the first time in the USA. It was an impressive event held in Charlottesville, Virginia (home of the Dave Matthews Band) at the very cool Omni Hotel. I distinctly remember stumbling, quite late, into the opening ceremony held in a large ballroom with a sea of crowded round tables with white clothes and endless wine glasses. I was surprised at how big it was when I creaked the door open along with another man, probably a bit older than me. He was wearing glasses and had a kind face. We both looked at each other with raised eyebrows, seemingly saying with our expressions, I guess we should just slide into these couple empty chairs at the back table. As the opening speeches came to a close, I introduced myself to the man who said he was Eric from New York. I shook his hand and said I’d hope to see him around over the next few days.
As I was walking away my marketing friend slid up to me with a big smile saying, ‘’Wow, great table you were at, huh?’ and asked how did you get seated there. I said something to the likes of ‘well, you know I have my ways’, thinking she was making fun of my late arrival and seat at the very back of the room. But she was not poking fun. She was actually impressed. I had not even poured a drop of my wine in the US yet and I had just made friends with Eric Asimov, the wine critic for the New York Times. He later came up to a private tasting in the hotel with a couple other folks to find out if they really did make Malbec in New Zealand. I met Jancis Robinson that weekend as well. And though that was a less interesting story, it showed me just how small and accessible this industry was at that stage
I’m not so sure our industry is that small any more. There are so many ‘influencers’ now, so many celebrity wine brands and so many made up corporate wine brands, it’s easy to get dizzy deciding what is real and what really is a true and honest wine to be appreciated. Sometimes I succumb to the idea that it’s simply just a drink we make that’s made to be enjoyed. The moment someone opens a wine I made is fleeting and with all the effort and passion I put into it, most of the time people are going to drink your wine and not think about it at all. I think of the amount of cheap wine bought in the supermarket and it’s easy to get disheartened thinking nobody cares and they’re just having a drink.
Thankfully I am reminded on a daily basis by my friends and colleagues on the passion and care we must take in making our wines. As far as wine writers go, I don’t have to look much farther than across the ditch to Australia. In 2017 at the NZ Pinot Noir Conference (held every four years until this pandemic came along), I heard Andrea Frost read one of her pieces. In my opinion this was a high water mark for our industry, at least in this part of the world. Andrea’s prose is second to none in this world. She eases through sentences with a grace like Thoreau while still emanating the passion for wine that rivals those winemakers down in the trenches. I met a few other writers at that conference who inspired me including Elaine Chukan Brown aka Hawk Wakawaka. This reignited my love for reading about wine, its places and its people. Now on a weekly basis I get my fix from vinous.com where there is not only the cream of the crop wine journalists but some of the coolest interactive maps in the biz. I love maps by the way.
All that said, I must ask the question, how can they afford to be journalists, particularly wine journalists? New Zealand, being the small market it is, has few if any, paying gigs for these folks. Presumably this drives our lack of local wine journalism these days. This is not a crack on NZ, just an acknowledgement of how tough it is out there; if there was someone who had the talent and passion, why would they pursue it? They must all become compromised by using their knowledge and prowess in some other way. They may be able to keep a writing gig going but supplement the income consulting for a distributor who may be selling some of the same wines they’re writing about. Then we ask ourselves as an industry, ‘can they really be unbiased in their writing?’ No judgement here, but it is a fact right now.
So there is no doubt that this year’s HB Wine Writer Scholarship winner has their work cut out for them. Throw in a pandemic to limit access and they will certainly have to get very creative. Still, we intend to give them all the support and ideas they may need. We cannot just abandon this contribution to our industry. The stories must be told as they are endlessly fascinating. Wine seems to somehow bridge the gaps between farming, industry, economics, travel, food, religion, politics, history, art, science and technology, just to name a few things. So we wish them the best of luck in finding their way to tell our stories to the rest of the world.
Cheers,
dB
