Writing On Wine

In all its checking-cleaning-cobbling-wandering-spitting glory, it's a wonderful life

NO ONE I HAVE ever known who makes wine for a living hates their job. Yet, like most "glamorous" endeavors, the reality is far removed from the image.

Winemaking, especially when done on a small, family-owned scale, is mostly hard work — spending hours in a cold barrel room, schlepping barrels or cleaning tanks or fixing hoses. It's spending money faster than you ever believed possible, waiting for years — years! — for the results of your work to be released. And then, when you've finally got your wine into the bottle and out in the world, it's hoping that some wine writer doesn't tag your precious product with a low score or an adjective like "weedy" or "barnyard."

Wine writing does have this in common with wine making. The day-to-day tasks, decisions and minutiae that constitute what I like to call my "self-unemployment" are not what you might imagine. There's a lot of time spent recycling boxes, organizing bottles, pulling corks, cleaning glasses, checking prices, answering e-mails.

Do I love this work? Absolutely and passionately! Is it anything like the nonstop parade of great food, great wine and interesting travel that it might appear to be? Rarely.

I have met many of the best-known wine writers from America, the United Kingdom and Australia. They are all one of a kind. A few, as I have, come from a journalism background, many more from a career in wine or food. There is no template for the profession that I can see, but I know of no one who set out at an early age, determined, by golly, to be a wine writer.

The rewards of the work may seem obvious, but designing a workable career is anything but. You have to know a lot about wine to begin, but you also have to know a lot about writing and communications. The two rarely go hand-in-hand. Almost everyone who makes a full-time living at it is employed by one of the major wine publications or cobbles together a freelance smorgasbord of writing, speaking, teaching and consulting work. It is rare to find a wine writer who has no monetary ties to the industry via endorsements, ad sales or even wine sales. (For the record, I do not.)

In an early column in The Seattle Times, I wrote that "a wine journalist is a bit of a wandering comet; riding in from the outer limits, streaming past the steady orbits of the grape growers, the vintners, the négociants, importers, distributors, wholesalers, retailers and marketers; extracting from the fruits of all of their labors the best information, the most interesting anecdotes, the most thrilling wines and, above all, the very best wine values, always with the reader's interest foremost in mind."

Hyperbole R Us! But the point I was trying to make is simple enough. I work for the consumer. The needs and concerns of my readers are uppermost in my mind. The industry often expects wine writers to be unpaid PR persons, but I believe that a good wine writer needs always to be looking for what is most interesting, valuable, even inspiring to the reader. Too many writers still fall back on dull technical details, flaunting their expertise instead of making it accessible.

It is a wonderful time for any wine lover to be living in Washington. A brand new, world-class wine region is being born. Apart from the usual wine writer's subject matter of new releases, different wine regions, etc., I have had the luxury of tracing the arc of this region's incredible growth for more than two decades.

My secret hope is to make a contribution to the industry itself, by providing a critical palate with genuine insider knowledge and no commercial ax to grind.

Now that the number of Washington wineries has topped 400 (overall, the Pacific Northwest is probably close to 1,000), there is plenty to cover right here at home. Still, it's important to keep a global perspective, because Washington wines must compete with the rest of the world.

Tasting wines is relentless. There's a sorcerer's apprentice aspect to the work. When the broom, you may recall, began carrying buckets of water, Mickey was pretty pleased with himself. But by the end of the day, he was dealing with a major flood. That's what tasting wine for a living is like.

A typical day? Well, yesterday, for example, I spent an hour tasting new releases from several Washington wineries, polished up my Wednesday column, sent off 150 reviews to the Wine Enthusiast, attended a two-hour tasting of 30 young Burgundies, then met with a dozen visiting Italian winemakers and sampled two dozen of their wines. Spitting all the way, believe me!

When too many such intense tasting days pile up, the tongue turns purple and the teeth won't shine, and the very thought of opening more wine feels like a burden, not a joy. I take a pause and remember the most sage advice any winemaker ever gave me: It takes a lot of beer to make good wine.

Paul Gregutt writes the Wednesday wine column for The Seattle Times and covers Northwest wine for the Wine Enthusiast magazine. Write to him at wine@seattletimes.com. Ken Lambert is a Seattle Times staff photographer.