“Still too many vicious wine bloggers out there. Making no money, no reputation, no life, no influence…100% frustrated! “

Pancho Campo MW

Blogging. It’s become like an insult. The very mention of the word blog has a negative connotation. There is a myopic pre-conception that because we “blog” we must in some way be amateur. It couldn’t be further from the truth.

The above quote from Spain’s rather outspoken first MW, Pancho Campo might be out of context, but it does resonate and goes to show the level of disdain there is in some parts of the wine world for anyone who wises to use a blog as a form of communication.

So what exactly is a blog? The term blog is a shortening of weblog. It’s a website that allows users to reflect, share opinions, and discuss various topics in the form of an online journal. Readers can comment on posts and postings are generally in chronological order.

I was curious to know what the blogging fraternity thought about the term and whether it caused consternation?

“I feel that blogging has become a dirty word. The problem with ‘blogging’ is that it has amateur connotations, that whatever is written in a blog is often perceived to be unprofessional. “

That’s the opinion of Andrew Graham; an Australian wine communicator who works in the wine industry and writes under the moniker Australian Wine Review. He represents two sides of the coin, both a blogger, and published wine writer. He asserts:

“Most wine bloggers would not even call their blog a blog after it gets to a certain size/prominence/influence, purely because of the negativity that surrounds the term. Instead they call it a wine site, or a wine portal. The clear impression though is simple – blogging is for wannabes, wine sites are for professionals.”

One of Britain’s foremost bloggers, Jamie Goode, started his blog the wine anorak back in 2001. I asked him what it is about blogging that is so fundamentally misunderstood?

Goode surmised: “A blog is just a communication tool, and there are lots of different people using blogs to communicate about wine – ranging from respected professionals to amateurs who just enjoy wine. I think there’s room for all. I think there are great bloggers and poor bloggers, but you can’t judge the medium by extreme examples.”

Recently, visiting international wine judge, Stephen Brook, in his address at the WCA Sydney Show lunch, seemed less than impressed with the world of blogging or tweeting. He saw much of the examples as self- indulgent and urged people to get back to using a pen and writing articles.

However, with diminishing column space and more than enough wine writers in this country, there’s a reason some of us turned to blogging. First of all it’s a passion. For many of us it started as a way to record tasting notes online instead of them being relegated to old bits of scrap paper. A blog gives us the ability to share those wines with an appreciative, like-minded audience. Everyone I interviewed for this piece did it for the sheer love, not for some commercial purpose.

The second reason is freedom. Blogs allow you to write without editorial constraints and no-one cold be more impartial on wines than Mr. Grumpy himself  – Andrew Graham. Andrew has carved a niche by not only being able to articulate a wine, but thanks to his experience of over a decade in the industry, he also follows and ranks wines according to both the 100 point scale and the 20 point show system. He’s a notoriously hard scorer too, having a blog enables him to be the most honest and as he has no commercial obligations, he’s free to call a spade a spade and often does.

In Australia there are some that view bloggers as self-indulgent or just pleased with their own voice. I asked Richard Corrigan MW whether this was true and he said “yes,” in his experience the biggest mistakes wine bloggers made was that they provided “highly subjective indulgent renditions.”

Last year an article that appeared in Winestate by Corrigan did not resonate well with Australia’s wine bloggers. It appeared he had not really researched the genre with much conviction and what blogs he did find, were in his eyes pretty lack lustre, yet basing an article on such a small cross section must rate as decidedly nebulous journalism. I put it to Corrigan that if you could not write magazines then online offered an alternative his response even starker: “You are pursuing a dying demand. It is like writing memoirs – it could be beautiful writing but nobody will read it.”

You have to remember that people like Jamie Goode and Neal Martin were established bloggers before they were considered fine wine writers, although there does seem to be an ‘us’ and ‘them’ mentality. Andrew Graham believes that some writers feel threatened:

“Whilst old school wine writers are masters of their craft, many of them have struggled to get their heads around digital media. More to the point, there is the old adage that ‘writers should never work for nothing’ and many of them thus can’t fathom why you would publish your cherished writing without any hope of remuneration. It doesn’t fit the traditional journalist’s ethos. Thus, the old school ignore digital media at their peril (or dabble without actual embracing) and end up losing out. Call it the last throws of a wounded lion.”

More optimistic is wine blogger Jeremy Pringle who writes under the name Wine Will Eat Itself, a somewhat philosophical scribe who has an uncanny ability to frame a wine and has gathered a loyal following along the way. He has nothing but praise for those in the industry who have been willing to help:

“I’ve actually experienced a lot of support, encouragement and guidance from a number of wine writers who still make a significant portion of their professional living out of traditional forms of journalism and hard copy media. I suspect that those who are disdainful of online writers feel insecure in the wake of the different ways people are now choosing to engage with wine.”

There has been a proliferation of wine blogs spring up in the last two years and it’s going to be only those that really want to do it who will endure and keep reinventing the genre. I asked wine writer Campbell Mattinson what advice he’d give someone who could not get their wine writing published the traditional way:

“So many wine blogs have been created in the past 5 years. This makes finding an audience incredibly difficult. The best way is to either team up with an established blogger/site (if you can) or band together with other like-minded bloggers and see if the power of numbers works in your favour. Most importantly though – blog regularly, and be prepared to work for no apparent financial gain for years. And years. If wine blogging is what you really want to do.”

Sounds depressing doesn’t it? Well yes and no. The trouble is when bloggers do get a chance or a break to write for something other than their blog there is a perception that bloggers will work for free. Take Juel Mahoney, an Australian writer living in London who writes as Winewomansong and Vinissima. There were many times where it was just expected of her to work gratis as she was a ‘blogger.’ Yet she has worked hard to establish a unique voice on the scene. She is now regularly asked to events, trips abroad and is starting to write paid articles. She believes none of her lucky breaks would have been possible without her site and Twitter. She maintains a reach because she has an alternative view on wine; her writing is often intellectually charged and lyrical.

Part of the reason this article came about, ie: in order to defend the noble art of blogging, was because of a recent study by Wine Intelligence (an organisation that conducts surveys and analyzes trends in the wine industry) who cited the following in a press release to get maximum shock value:

“Independent bloggers are one of the least trusted wine information sources in the UK, USA and France, according to research published today, despite the growing importance of the Internet as a source of information about wine. “

Sound a bit dubious? Only a week later, Wine Intelligence were doing some serious back peddling “Arguably we took the sensationalist approach…partly because we wanted to generate some debate.”

And debate it caused, as US blogger, Vinography pointed out:

“Quite a clever tactic to publish a study finding out wine bloggers that would likely prompt a lot of them to write about it, no?”

It seems they really did not ask the right set of questions to the right people, managing to only ask those in the North east of the United States. They left most of California off the survey all together. This  prompted American wine site Another Wine Blog to point out: “A survey on wine consumption that ignores the state of California is a bit like doing a report on the oil industry and ignoring the entire state of Texas.”

It would seem the survey was skewed to getting the results they wanted, rather than a real representation of what the right demographic might have opined.

Jamie Goode says; “in some ways, blogging is a very pure and honest form of communication, because many use it without commercial motives. It’s stupid to say that bloggers are the ‘least trusted sources of wine information’, and I think the Wine Intelligence report was daft and ill-conceived.”

But even Alder Yarrow, as one of the top bloggers in the U.S., is honest enough to be circumspect on the fact that not all bloggers are as talented as they might think:

Most people are most certainly going to trust their local wine merchant, an established critic, or a sommelier in a restaurant more than a blogger. And frankly as a rule, they should. Why? Because a lot of wine bloggers don’t really know what they’re talking about. There’s a lot of crap out there when it comes to wine blogs and there isn’t enough really great writing to have produced a situation where it’s easy for average consumers to find trustworthy, reliable, and informed wine recommendations from blogs.

It’s good to see a blogger be this honest. Of course there is good and bad blogging, just as there are good and bad wines, art, poetry, or movies, but each of them will find an audience despite the quality. I posed the question to Andrew whether having many poorly written blogs will give the genre a bad reputation:

Yes. But discouraging people from blogging is not the right thing. One of the things we are trying to encourage at the WCA is to reward the best bloggers, and also to help train the inexperienced bloggers so that the whole genre benefits. At the moment it’s only a very small pool – the wine bloggers in Australia that is – but we’d like to see it grow, and part of that is to get inexperienced writers talking about their perceptions/experiences.

And when it comes to the quality of writing I ask Mattinson (one of Australia’s finest and what I’d describe as cerebral wine writers), what some of the big mistakes that new writers or wine bloggers make when it comes to writing. He could not comment on blogs specifically as he does not read enough but had this to say about writing in general.

“As a general view on ‘new writers’ I’d say a few things: find your own voice, your own perspective, and don’t try to mimic or regurgitate the voice/words of others. Also – be prepared to be critical, and be prepared to be positive. And – I think we all underestimate the pressures/fears/constraints other writers are under … and therefore make the odd wrong assumption about how or why they do what they do.”

To keep a blog’s content fresh and engaging is a labour borne of love and none of us would bother if we were not passionate about its worth. The quality and length was another thing that Stephen Brook took issue with seeing arcane, long tasting notes as redundant. Although I’d argue  that from a traditionalists point of view, when you are only used to writing a set amount of words, the free form nature of a blog would seem quite an alien thing.

But that’s precisely the allure, no editorial constraints means you can review the wines you like and wax lyrical to your hearts content. A classic case in point is Dave Brookes, the marketing manager for Teusner wines who blogs under the name vinofreakism.

Dave writes about wines that fascinate him, (more often than not natural wines) and you’d seldom find them written up in traditional print as they are quite obscure. He finds writing his posts as personally educational and he wants to share these revelatory experiences. His notes for one wine alone are about 500 words long and each tasting note ends with an illuminating and quirky image that represents the wine.

He maintains that the more he writes the longer people stay and has found that on average his readers stay for up to 30 minutes as their interest gets piqued by other posts. It may seem self-indulgent to some, but bloggers are all capitalising on the web to maintain traffic, which means employing SEO techniques and using Google Analytics to monitor hit rates. How the times are changing.

And who knows where the future lies, but it seems certain that online and social media will keep gaining traction and that traditional print will keep shrinking. So the battle for bloggers is to be true to themselves and to maintain a voice that reeks of integrity and conviction. Andrew Graham believes:

The biggest challenge that bloggers face is the struggle for legitimacy. Over the next five years you will see the more prominent bloggers take their sites/personalities into a much more professional space, with the best bloggers realising the role of video to propel their site and brand into a legitimate paid sphere. It’s happening already in the US, where the blog community is considerably more advanced than our own.

Interesting times indeed and while really the blogging genre is still in its infancy it will be interesting to see who hangs in there to prove the doom mongers wrong? I believe that we will see a certain democratisation of the wine writing world thanks to blogging, but will let fellow blogger Jeremy Pringle have the last word:

“As bloggers aren’t answerable to editors, they can choose to publish the sort of content that is of interest to them. Ideally this will lead to more diversity in the written coverage of wine. I’m wary of the term “democratisation” but I am certainly happy to see the power base of one or two major critics begin to be distributed over a group of worthwhile and different opinions.”

Patrick Haddock is a freelance journalist and wine communicator, he’s not embarrassed to say he blogs at www.winingpom.com.au

This article first appeared in the March edition of  WBM Magazine.