Changing of the Guard in Wine Media
— An Essay on the Rising Influence of Online Wine Criticism —

The center of gravity in wine media is slowly shifting.  That, of course, assumes a very liberal definition of that term — one that includes not only internet news sites and weblogs, but the more interactive technologies developing and arising from the more static structure we've come to associate with online information retrieval.  There is an unspoken assumption among the darlings of traditional print media: those who take advantage of the democratization of expression and communication that the internet has afforded aren't true writers or broadcasters — they're merely hobbyists.  The attitude is tacit and lurks just below the surface, but it's nevertheless omnipresent.  However, the reality is that there has been a giant sleeping among the ever shrinking and more rapidly scurrying Lilliputians of the newspaper, magazine, and perhaps even network television industries.

That giant, the Internet, is gaining consciousness, strength, and soon a formidable sense of coordination and power otherwise known as Web 2.0, the likes of which the ropes of mass media will eventually fail to monopolize and subdue.  Showing an especially intriguing skepticism for the decentralization of knowledge that information technology has afforded the rest of us is traditional wine media. There's a bit of a struggle underfoot, and interestingly, there's been very little open and candid dialogue about it.  How much longer can we pretend that the Web isn't viably competing with, and ultimately threatening to replace, traditional media as the source from which enthusiasts gain their wine knowledge?

Since the beginning, the gathering and periodic dissemination of information has been in the hands of the few.  This has historically made sense, since the process has depended entirely on the physical distribution of stacks of paper to people who were interested in staying abreast of current events or becoming informed on any one of a nearly infinite number of topics.  But as firmly entrenched as this mode of knowledge retrieval is, in human history as well as in the infrastructure of modern civilization, it's inherently passive.  The information on a printed page isn't dynamic; it cannot be easily cross-referenced or compared with that found elsewhere in the same document or other sources; it doesn't allow for instant marking or searching of key words, names, or phrases; it cannot be easily sent to any number of people all over the world in real time; and it doesn't allow for efficient and widespread reactive dialogue.

The internet as a medium, on the other hand, allows for all of those things — as well as permutations thereof that lend a kind of synergistic versatility to the manipulation and consumption of information.  But none of this, per se, is news (pardon the pun).  What is noteworthy is the fact that these interactive qualities and features are making the online medium grow exponentially both in power and relevance, and will be upon what hinges its evolution (superiority, perhaps?) over traditional media.  One domain in which see this quite prominently is social media.  In the area of wine, organizations like the Open Wine Consortium, Wine 2.0, Cruvee, and Snooth are prominent examples, along with the use of more generalized tools that a great many wine enthusiasts and neophytes have embraced, like Twitter and Facebook.  Wine is even getting poised to enjoy its own search engine, through Doug Cook's Able Grape.  This becomes exponentially more significant when we take into account the fact that the wine industry, at its core, is not technological, but agrarian.  

But lest I come across as an unconditional proponent of online media in the context of wine, allow me at least to mention its less attractive side: it very easily becomes focused more on the medium than on the message, more about the technological means than the vinous end.  Or, perhaps more precisely, it can often slip into something that's less about the human connection that makes wine special, magical, spiritual, even transcendent, and more about Twittering and Flickring and (My)Spacing out.  Each of these trees is great, but let's not miss the forest for them.  Nothing in my experience thus far has illustrated this better than an event that took place on the initial day of the first-ever North American Wine Bloggers Conference that I attended recently in Sonoma County, California.  Officially called the Live Wine Blogging event, it entailed wine producers and winery representatives moving from table to table, where the wine bloggers sat in a hotel dining room, to pour their wines into our glasses as we listened to them talk up their respective products.  With about 150 people in the room, about ten bloggers to each of more than a dozen tables, the atmosphere was loud and a bit frenetic.  What made it even more so was that the exercise had to be done in a span of five minutes per table — a constraint that earned the event the ostensibly affectionate and quite appropriate monicker of "speed dating."  I'm not sure if the speed element was chosen out of practicality or to accommodate inherently low attention spans, but looking around me and watching my table mates furiously tapping away at the keyboards of their laptops in which they had their faces buried was something I found amusing, baffling, and frankly disturbing.  Witnessing this scene, I couldn't help but think to myself, "Is this about wine… or about how quickly we can fire off evaluations about wine to a presumably eager and faceless audience out in the ether, awaiting with bated breath on assessments being posted in real time?" I wanted so much to reach out and snap those laptops shut, and invite my companions rather to dialogue and share their experiences with one another… you know, using eyes, ears, and mouths.  It was at that point that I realized what I'd strongly suspected all along: I'm no blogger.  And while I may benefit in learning a thing or two from this approach that's so "automatic for the people," I don't naturally shoot well from the hip.

Now, none of this is to say that the act of writing about wine via blogs (or any other online tool) as a collective medium isn't significant.  My entire point is that it is — when it's done with careful thought, genuine passion, focused intention, and true creativity.  In those cases, it's really quite powerful and moving.  And it works; it touches people's lives.  Which is a core value of media, regardless of its platform.  Sure, just as with newspapers, magazines, and television broadcasts, there's fluff and mediocrity all over the internet; there's a great deal of people publishing online who believe that just because they can, then they should.  But nobody said the sleeping giant of online media had to be nicely groomed and well-mannered.  The point is, he's growing in size and power, and the bellow of his voice and stomp of his boots will soon be heard the world over — a sound too loud and clear to ignore, even among the Lilliputians of print publications, even as they are strong in number and tight in organization.  In fact, they'd do well to take heed.

In some cases, they already have.  One of the most compelling images of the industrial media supporting — in fact, embracing — the independent web-based media as a significant source of wine information is the following video.  Taken from Gary Vaynerchuck's WineLibraryTV, arguably one of the most influential sources of wine information on the internet, it features as his guest the pre-eminent wine author, Jancis Robinson.  Having written a number of books on wine — so many, in fact, that (as she admits in the video) she has lost count — she can easily be considered to be the quintessential wine academic.  Of course, so can Hugh Johnson and even more so, Michael Broadbent — but, we don't see either of them on internet TV, let alone occasionally allowing their feathers to be publicly ruffled with North Jersey boisterousness.  Which bring us back to Jancis, whose appearance alongside the raw, irreverent, and audacious Vaynerchuck was simultaneously fascinating, heartening, and inspiring.  Admittedly, I was bracing to be shocked, but instead I became excited and mesmerized as I watching the two of them not only interact, but engage in a bit of a dance.  And then it hit me: this was… significant.  Robinson's good spirited embrace of a medium so vastly different from anything we might normally associate with her, is a testament of hope that mass media will warm up to and even integrate with the unorthodox and oftentimes experimental methods in which the newer generation of web-based wine writers and broadcasters regularly engage.  Not that the sleeping giant needed any validation, thank you very much… but it's certainly very empowering to have earned it.  This, my friends, is the old guard embracing the new.

Clearly, the online world is evolving.  On the side of print media, however, it remains to be seen if this is being done quickly, rigorously, and comprehensively enough to mirror the changes coming about on the side of internet media.  As the internet becomes ever more sophisticated, increasing the effectiveness and efficiency with which it organizes, categorizes, and cross-references online media, thereby rendering it exquisitely more versatile and dynamic, the act of gathering our wine knowledge from printed periodicals comes under scrutiny.  Magazines like Decanter, Wine Spectator, and Wine & Spirits all have online versions of their publications, but for now that's precisely how they're positioned on the landscape — as pallid versions of the print medium.  The existing paradigm of information circulation is still, in large part, simply being transposed onto webpages that largely lack the interactivity, creativity, and dynamism of web-borne technologies.  To be fair, many of these tools have only recently begun to take hold — but a year in 'internet time' is an eternity in real time.  I feel it's safe to say that, in general, traditional wine media are at best merely cautiously following what's hot on the internet, and at worst simply ignoring it.

But surely it can't be all doom and gloom for the mass media monolith; not for something that's been firmly entrenched in the way we as humans have always gathered our news.  In the interest of substantiating my otherwise anecdotal conclusions, and getting a clearer and more nuanced view of the larger picture, I spoke with Manhattan-based trade and consumer media veteran Robert DiGioia, who had this to say: "Newspapers that don't deliver interest- and behavioral-based content across multi-channels (print, web, email, mobile, video) are quickly losing relevance and readership.  Not to mention sponsors.  Media-agnostic advertisers are abandoning generic, institutional, "big-splash" campaigns in exchange for quantifiable, targeted, lead-generating offers and platforms.  Long-form, image-laden feature articles have a natural home in print and magazines.  But the online domain rules up-to-the-second headlines and sound bytes.  Luxury online and print magazines have the upper hand in today's media landscape, with high-end subscribers and brands granting immunity from economic downturns."

So, what's the take-away message here?  Each mode of media would do well take inspiration and adopt practices from the other.  Online wine media — the bloggers, webcasters, interactive tool developers — should continually self-evaluate for relevance, impact, and original (niche) contribution to the industry.  Above all, they should be very clear on whom their audience is, and that it would find their content or methodology truly engaging.  Blogging or webcasting just for the sake of blogging or webcasting merely bounces back the irrelevant echo of an empty chamber.  Printed wine media — the magazines and newspapers — should more aggressively research burgeoning online tools and technologies, hiring some of the technology talent behind them, thereby proactively bridging the gap between the two modes of media.  Newer generations of wine drinkers will continue to arrive on the scene and, for better or worse, they'll increasingly look to the internet as their primary, if not sole, source of wine knowledge.  Fully embracing that inevitable reality benefits us all.