Crumbling wine columns

In the light of the recent news that Tim Atkin has had his column pruned to a seedling in the Observer I began to reflect how wine writing is being increasingly marginalised in the national press at the very time when there is growing interest in the subject and burgeoning consumer base. Marginalised is the appropriate word; a mere two recommendations pushed to the extreme margin of the page in minuscule font. Two wines? More like two fingers stuck up to the world of wine.

This is the thick end of the wedge. Joanna Simon’s column in the Sunday Times was taken “in-house” in March 2009; the Indie chopped Richard Ehrlich’s years ago and Andrew Jefford, who once upon a time, wrote deft wine appreciations accompanying Fay Maschler’s restaurant reviews in the Evening Standard, was suddenly deemed superfluous to requirements.  One can hardly say that the changes have been for the better. If one examines the vacuous contents of the aforementioned newspapers and magazines you will read (if you are so inclined) endless cut-and-paste interviews, see rafts of pictures of what someone’s front room looks like amidst an unending diet of celebrity tittle-tattle and what can only be described as a glut of food pornography. It is all third-rate fluff, style over substance, vanity fair, illustrating, as Frederick Cranes sagely observed, that magazines are indeed “the mayflies of the literary world”.

One theory is that editors are under pressure to cut costs and they view wine as of peripheral interest. Yet wine is a multi-billion pound business, an integral part of the thriving hospitality industry, available in supermarkets and high street and is drunk at most dining tables in the land.

An alternative explanation is that there is a neo-prohibitionist agenda that posits consumption of alcohol is a bad thing and therefore should not be obviously promoted in the media. This is ridiculous because the point of a good wine column is that it encourages us to drink better and with greater discernment, not to drink more.

However, it has been the trend in any case for several years to dumb-down-size the wine column. Perish the thought, for example, that journalists might be given scope to take a broader view of the subject rather than highlighting the latest supermarket promotional gimmick. Wine can always be about more than simply recommending a nice bottle to drink; as a subject it encompasses history, travel, culture; whilst wine itself has inspired philosophy, poetry and music; and is inextricably linked with cooking and food. We are fortunate in this country to have knowledgeable, well-educated and passionate writers who can write adeptly and eloquently about their specialism, yet they are being stifled by editors with little wit and less imagination, unable to appreciate that wine is best covered when written about in detail and with a modicum of intelligence.

Atkin is a naturally good communicator, has the awards to prove it and has proved that it is possible to write accessibly about wine without being facile.  To assume that the public is not interested in wine is boneheaded. One journalist on a national newspaper confided to me that her previous recommendations had resulted in the immediate aftermath in a fivefold, and in one case, tenfold increase, of sales of those wines. This is evidence that consumers do read the columns and take note of what is written. As per capita consumption has gone up over the decades and we are exposed to wine in so many more areas of our lives, so our individual and collective knowledge has developed. The more we learn the more we naturally desire to find out. By giving the wine writers such short shrift the editors of newspapers and magazines are therefore doing a grave disservice to their readers.

Wine journalism is hobbled by the traditional media. Television, in all its glorious frivitas, has never covered wine with any commitment or analytical energy and radio, despite its more intelligent approach, is hardly the ideal medium. It is no wonder that writers have gravitated enthusiastically to the new media, setting up blogs and web-sites, communicating via face book and twitter, liberating themselves from advertisers and editorial politics. It is an indictment of journalism in this country that the best wine writing can only appear in specialist journals or online, and that the nationals seem unable to support columns which display real knowledge and a passion for the topic.