Communities are by nature people inter-dependent, whether on each other, on trade and commerce between them, on sharing ideas along well-traveled routes, or on benefiting from collected strengths, the whole always being greater than the sum of its parts.

There will always be “middlemen” because there isn’t enough time in the day. You can’t farm and prune vines and clean equipment and turn barrels and make sales trips as consistently as your operation’s revenue stream requires. And it’s brutal to track those sales when your farm is at home and you’re in Vegas serving to wine managers after 1:30 in the morning because that’s when they get off. You shift and adjust to the market. You need help to do everything required. The story supports the sales, not the other way around.

Thoughts are shared in vibrant, productive communities of all types. Ancient cities had orators. Tribes had shamans. New republics defend free press. If you are a writer and a communicator, you experience and you extend. If not wine, then something. Your use your passion to extend someone else’s passion. To an audience who passionately wants to know more.

The consumers are smarter, growing in legion and placed (and accessible) throughout the world. Wine is still red or white in many places where direct sales can now provide unique, small, focused products for tables dressed with a variety of foods and conversations. The educational aspect of wine writing reaches far deeper than product review. Interacting over mutual interest. Exposure to something interesting and new. An experience remembered and shared forward.

For the last ten years I have given tours to people from every state and written dozens of wine club newsletters and e-mail letters for wineries with great reach, sharing what happens in this growing region with visitors and unseen consumers who have greater access and greater interest and are hungry for a relationship. The communication is two-way and the response is easily measurable.

The economy and the wine world are clearly shifting, but as long as someone produces pencils and paper, then writers will extend passionate stories. But a change of perspective may be required, as it always has been. Look at the existence of mobile bottling lines. Collaborative, innovative, productive, and certainly not the way your grandfather did it.

There is no denying the people supporting the industry are in trouble. Things will always be placed in bottles and boxes and there are all kinds of sales to account, but the vineyard owner and the apprentice winemaker toiling away in anonymity have a passion and finely-honed skill set that doesn’t shift easily. The fiscal crisis reaches every tier of the industry, from grape contracts to recycled packaging materials to tasting room staff. We’re headed back to cash on the barrel head interaction, buying a good bottle of wine in a good deal from a good person. If the internet and blogs and Facebook feed that conversation, then writers will migrate there. We already are.

The new contribution, perhaps responsibility, may be to telling the stories of the people before the grape. A completely unsolicited recommendation for Steve’s book, New Classic Winemakers of California, does just that.

Who and why before what or where.

The relationship, the interesting tidbit, the enlightenment, the point of personal connection that a tasting room visitor takes back to Overland Park, Kansas or Tampa, Florida usually strikes after hearing directly about a person who got their hands dirty, not the difference between varietals. That the sound of harvest beginning is many knives sharpening on whetstones in the pre-dawn fog.

The success of orators and shamans and the free press and good storytelling has always been making it simple for readers to reply, respond and react. Because then they buy and trade and share. It’s a 5,000 year old industry with great new tools and I see optimistic opportunity. But there isn’t one of us who can do it alone.

“When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.”
– Hunter S. Thompson

I truly think you’re giving consumers more credit than they deserve – I’m NOT convinced the average consumer ‘sees through’ the spin most wineries give – and this is evident when I do consumer events and here the misconceptions about the winemaking process/specific wines. Sometimes it just makes me giggle – but more often than not, it makes me reiterate what I said in my last post . . .

So I still think there is a LOT of work we all need to do – starting with wineries and trickling down from there. And I truly, honestly believe that there will always be a prominent place for independent writers such as yourself . . . as long as you give my wines great ratings (-:

Cheers!

Very good comments. I agree that consumers should and will be very leary of info coming directly from wineries, as they should. As we all know, most wineries cannot and will not look at their products objectively, instead telling consumers how wonderful every wine they make is, even that one that stuck during fermentation and smells of who knows what . . .

Until the industry as a whole changes its tune and really trys to educate consumers in a non-obtrusive, non-belittling way, third party writers will ALWAYS have a job . . . . unless THEY become more subjective and less objective . . .

Cheers!