On today’s episode, Mike talks with his good friend, Jeff Siegel, otherwise known as the Wine Curmudgeon; writer, author of The Wine Curmudgeon’s Guide to Cheap Wine, and excellent freelance writer. The two discuss wine media – how it’s changed from the ‘good old days’, and how it continues to change moving into the future.
They also chat about how the wine biz has changed in ‘modern’ times, and how it’s perceived by new generations. This is definitely an episode you don’t want to miss!
Transcript on Wine Media in the Wine Biz
Michael Wangbickler:
Hey, HTB podcast listeners, it’s Mike Wangbickler again, and today we’re joined on the podcast by an old friend, somebody I’ve known for almost 20 years, Jeff Siegel, otherwise known as the Wine Curmudgeon; writer, author of The Wine Curmudgeon’s Guide to Cheap Wine, and excellent freelance writer. And all-around mensch is Jeff Siegel. Thanks for being on the show, man.
Jeff Siegel:
Thank you, Mike. It’s a real pleasure. I’ve been looking forward to doing this for a very long time.
Michael Wangbickler:
Well, you know, it’s we did record an episode for your podcast as well, and we commented that it’s been a long time. We should have done this a long time ago. So, I’m glad that we’re finally getting around to it. So today I wanted to approach a subject that is near and dear to our hearts, and that is basically kind of this whole change in the media landscape that’s happened over the last 20 years or so. And with covid pandemic has kind of accelerated some of that.
So, I just thought we’d kind of wax nostalgic a little bit about like how it was in the good old days and then talk about how things are today. So, Jeff remind me and my listeners, like when you started writing about wine and what started all of that.
Jeff Siegel:
So, I’ve been doing the blog, The Wine Curmudgeon, at winecurmudgeon.com now subscription via Substack since the fall November of 2007. Before that, I’ve been writing about wine freelance. Was the wine columnist for the Star-Telegram newspaper in Fort Worth, so I’ve now been doing this probably close to 30 years. Which means that I’ve seen the old days, I saw the days that replaced the old days, and I’ve seen the post-modern days. And it’s been there has been a long, strange trip.
Michael Wangbickler:
And you started in sports writing?
Jeff Siegel:
Oh, a long time ago. In fact, I was talking to a friend of mine about this the other day. I covered high school sports in the suburbs of Chicago when I got out of college in the late 1970s, early 1980s, and that was high school basketball. Crystal Lake, Illinois, and Chicago, pre climate change, Chicago, February. That was a lot of fun.
Michael Wangbickler:
Well, it’s interesting to see, like, actually, we probably know several people who had had a background in sports writing who also kind of took up the wine beat back in the eighties and nineties, you know, because I think that there was this increased demand for content regarding wine during that time, because things in the wine sector, especially the American wine sector, was seeing some new attention.
Jeff Siegel:
Yeah, and I think one of the reasons that so many sportswriters are going to do it is, first off, we traveled. So as opposed to somebody who covers the cops or city government where you just go to the police station, or you go to the city hall and that’s where you spend all your time. If you’re a sportswriter, you’re on the road a lot, and so, you taste different stuff, and you get a chance to do different stuff, to have wine with dinner and so on and so forth.
The other thing about it is and I and I – this is going to sound silly – but sportswriters typically were some of the best writers on a newspaper because you were allowed a little more leeway. You didn’t have to say, “The city council voted six to three tonight to increase taxes 10 percent”, which is basically how every city council meeting story starts. If you’re covering a baseball game or a basketball game or a football game, each game is different.
And you have to have a little you have to approach it differently. And I think that writing flair carried over because, yeah, you’re right. I mean, we sat here by name ten, ten or twelve people, we started out in wine, many of whom were well known and important people.
Michael Wangbickler:
Yeah, well, I think to your point and that is that sports writing, like wine writing, you have a certain amount of editorializing you can do right? You can talk about how terrible a particular batter was at the plate or how great the home run, the grand slam home run was.
Funny that we just default to baseball, but… and same thing with wine because, I mean, you know, when you’re writing about wine as a wine writer, you’re expected to offer your opinion about the wine itself and what you think of it and perhaps give it a rating. So, there’s a similarity to that.
Jeff Siegel:
No, that’s exactly right. Again, if you’re covering the police beat, there’s not a whole lot of editorial license you can put in a crime. Happens there. It is. The bank was robbed. Somebody was shot. If you’re covering the city council meeting, there’s not a whole lot of editorial license. But if you’re on the road with the – we’re back to a baseball team – if you’re on the road with a baseball team, you know, 15 games in 17 days and every game is completely different if you don’t put any editorial license in, you’ll go crazy.
Michael Wangbickler:
Right. Exactly. So, OK, so fast forward a little bit to the I don’t know, probably 20 years ago about the time when we started to see the emergence of more electronic media and we started to see this kind of transition from print media to electronic media in the way that people consumed news. And how did that affect you personally, and what did you observe about how wine writing changed at that time?
Jeff Siegel:
I think one of the things that – I love that question, by the way, because it gives me a chance to sound really intelligent. But one of the things that happened that nobody has really noticed is that during the 80s and the 90s, up until the dotcom boom, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, which is probably the end of the heyday of print, if you wanted to sell wine in a particular town, you got a review in the local newspaper.
So, these people had tremendous, tremendous clout. So, whether it was – now I’m going to have to try to remember names, which I don’t remember, so please forgive me everybody whose name I’m not going to do – but whether you are in Dallas or Houston or San Francisco or Philadelphia or South Florida, it was a personal relationship, and the wine marketing people, the PR people, they would know every newspaper reporter, and they would be able to pick up the phone and say, “hey, listen, I got this great wine for you, I’m going to send you a sample”.
I can remember, again, not with anybody’s name, but at the Houston Chronicle – and Houston is a tremendous wine market – when the wine writer took retirement, they weren’t going to replace. And our friend [inaudible] , who was working for Gallo at the time, called the editor of the newspaper and said, “This is the Houston Chronicle, this is one of the most important wine markets in America, you have to have a wine writer.” And they went and found a wine writer who was a guy who wrote sports but also knew about wine. Dale…
Michael Wangbickler:
Yep.
Jeff Siegel:
OK, you can’t remember Dale’s last name, either. Put it in the notes, Michael put it [crosstalk]. But that’s the kind of authority and clout and respect that newspaper wine writers had. I did a little newspaper wine writing at the Star-Telegram newspaper in Fort Worth. And I mean, everybody returned my phone calls. So fast forward then to the beginning of the electronic age and all of the sudden it didn’t matter if you worked for a newspaper or not and you were just one of many.
And at the beginning of the Internet age, everybody decided they were going to be a wine writer because they saw Robert Parker and they saw Jancis Robinson in the two or three others who were successful, and they said, “oh, well, all I have to do is have a wine blog, and I will be a star”, which, of course, didn’t happen.
So instead of – I hate to use the term gatekeepers – but instead of respected people who knew what they were doing and knew what they were talking about, and so if you read the guy who just died in South Florida, Fred, but you knew if you read his stuff, he was going to recommend a wine and you could go to a local store and it would be available and you would enjoy it.
Michael Wangbickler:
Yeah, Fred Tasker wrote a column for the Miami Herald, yeah.
Jeff Siegel:
Yeah, and then instead we had a democratization of this, which is not necessarily a bad thing, but because it’s the wine business and availability is always important, you had people writing about wine and recommending wine that no one could possibly buy.
You had people recommending wine that they didn’t know wasn’t available. You had people recommending wine because they liked it and didn’t know that it was already – my favorite thing probably about that is Beaujolais, right? Every time there’s a new generation of wine people, Beaujolais becomes popular, and you had all that stuff going on. And again, it’s neither good nor bad. It’s just the way it changed, and it made for those of us – for lack of a better term – we’re professionals, it made our job that much more difficult.
Michael Wangbickler:
Yeah, because, I mean, basically what you were doing with the democratization, basically what it did is it took away the necessary necessity for the expertise. Right. You know, you’re the expert who’s no longer respected in the same way.
Because anybody could – and anybody can write about wine, and in a way, this is partly the wine media’s fault because – not necessarily the newspaper.
Michael Wangbickler:
I think it’s almost entirely the wine media’s fault.
Jeff Siegel:
Not necessarily the newspaper people, because – but a lot of them played into that. But you had these people who set themselves up online and said, “This wine is 94 points, and you better damn well go out and buy it”. And it didn’t matter if it cost 80 bucks or if it cost 30 bucks. I love to tell this story. A good, good friend of mine, a wine drinker for years and years and years, said he kept buying Robert Parker at 90-point Australian Shiraz’s.
And he came to me, and he said, “This is 90 points, how come I don’t like it?” And I said, “Because that’s Robert Parker’s opinion. You like Bordeaux, you like red Bordeaux, you like French wine. Why the hell would you buy a wine 90 points when it’s high in alcohol, way too much fruit, et cetera, et cetera” and so forth. And finally, I talk some sense into him.
Michael Wangbickler:
Well, you know, I think that yeah to a certain extent, you know, the Robert Parkers, the Wine Spectator’s, the Wine Enthusiast of the world. They really kind of simplified wine criticism down to scores. It’s a very American thing to do and it’s – that’s understandable, considering the fact that people’s time is valuable and, you know, not everyone wants to sit there and read about a thousand-word article about some obscure region in Burgundy.
They just want to know which wine actually they should buy because somebody who knows something about that wine says it’s good, right? And so that’s where that kind of endorsement comes in and again, you know where the [inaudible] is struggling right now and that basically, their expertise is not as valued as it once was, with the exception. I mean, you know, there’s some people who still, you know, they still earn the respect that they deserve, but it’s become very hard for really talented freelance writers to make a living, especially just if they specialize in wine and spirits.
Jeff Siegel:
I was… I’ve been lucky in all the years I’ve been doing this; I did other things besides wine because I could never make a living just by doing this, just by writing about wine. So, you know, I’ve done trade magazines, I’ve done consumer magazines, I’ve written about other stuff. But it’s always been brutal, and it’s even more brutal now. And again, the thing that always struck me about wine criticism is that so much of it took so much of the fun out of wine.
Michael Wangbickler:
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Jeff Siegel:
Supposed to be fun. You’re supposed to drink it. When I read a review and I try to write a review, I want to tell the people why I’m excited about drinking this wine.
Michael Wangbickler:
Right.
Jeff Siegel:
You just… you see so little of that.
Michael Wangbickler:
Well, you know, it’s one of the that’s one of the my… [chuckles] You know, people who know me know that I get up on the soapbox once in a while. So, and the soapbox that is my favorite is the one about making sure that you are telling a unique story. Because the fact is, is that when you say that your family owns that, you make your wine in the vineyard, that your small batch, that everything is handcrafted, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, everybody else is telling the same story, right?
And everybody else can say the same thing, right? So, you know, why should any critic care about your wine if it has no difference? If it doesn’t that doesn’t differentiate itself from any of the other wines out there. The fact is, is that when you’re starting, you’re starting to see a lot more where those wineries that are written about have an interesting story behind them, and it’s something that interests the writer and in turn interests their readers.
So, my advice to my readership is, always find whatever that uniqueness is, and if you don’t know what that is and can’t find it, call me, I’ll help you.
Jeff Siegel:
That’s what you’ve been doing successfully for a very long time.
Michael Wangbickler:
Well, we try. OK, so that’s where we’ve been, you know, where are we now and where do we think this is it’s going to be going in terms of, you know, this – I mean, I’m on the producer and the agency side, so I’m the PR side. Then you’re on the other side of the writing side, you know, like where… First of all, where’s the relationships going to go between these two kinds of camps and what does the future look like if we can kind of look into the crystal ball?
Jeff Siegel:
I think I think it’s a couple of things that are happening and we can see them right now and they revolve around the consolidation in the wine business. And that’s not just on the producer side, but it’s also on the retail side and it’s also on, to a lesser extent on the wholesaler’s side. So, let’s just say in the newspaper days, you had to… You had an audience that wanted to get some advice on buying wine so they would read the newspaper critic and then they would go to the store with the article in hand and go buy the wine.
And to us – to a certain extent that still happens. I know my mom does that with my stuff, but as we get fewer and fewer and bigger and bigger wineries and we get fewer and fewer and bigger and bigger retailers, and you go to the supermarket and you got the supermarket wall of wine, which is basically for retail, for producers controlling that entire wall. And as we get more people – and I think the last number is fifty, fifty-five percent of the wine sold in the US is sold in supermarkets.
The critic, the wine writer becomes that much less of a necessity because the producers and the retailers control the selling space. And when I go to the supermarket, I’m going to buy what’s there, and basically, all the wines taste the same. They have the same cute stuff on the back label – and I’m exaggerating and oversimplifying, obviously, but they have the same cute sayings on the back label and they’re and they’re aimed at people who buy wine in the supermarket.
And so, for people like me who actually want to recommend wines that are generally widely available in the supermarket, that’s a real problem. So, thank God for Libelle Veltliner, a damn fine wine, and it’s still widely available in the supermarket. Now on the other end for the people that you work with on the higher end side, the critic is going to become perhaps in a different place because you’re going to need the – if I’m going to pay 80 bucks, 60, 80, 40, 60, 80 bucks for a bottle of wine, I may want more than what’s on Yelp or Vivino.
I may still have to go to somebody who is going to give it 92 points. And the other thing about this is retailers are now trusted in a way they’ve never been before.
Michael Wangbickler:
Mmmm…Mmhm…
Jeff Siegel:
People will go into Trader Joe’s and will buy the absolute crappiest wine because it’s a Trader Joe’s, and they trust Trader Joe’s. And that’s just not Trader Joe’s, that’s true of all…[crosstalk]
Michael Wangbickler:
Yeah, Total Wine, Bevmo…yeah…
Jeff Siegel:
I won’t say [crosstalk].
I don’t wanna get in trouble with any retailer…
Michael Wangbickler:
Yeah, no we’re good. So… has that gap widened? Because I think that there’s always been this kind of you know, you’ve got the supermarket brands and you get like everyone else has that gap widened over the past couple of years?
Jeff Siegel:
Oh, I think it’s I think it’s widened tremendously. And again, this is a function of doing this for so long, I can remember when supermarkets barely sold any wine at all.
Michael Wangbickler:
Well, it depends on which state you’re in, too.
Jeff Siegel:
Well, ignoring California. But for instance, there’s a fine importer in suburban Chicago called Wine Cellars. They do really nice, inexpensive wine, Argentine, French, Germans, and Spanish. And the guy who founded Wine Cellars was in the late 60s, I believe is right. He was the guy who invented the wine program for one of the Chicago area’s biggest supermarket chains. This was only the late 60s, right? So, by the height of the wine boom in the early 80s, right early-mid-80s, supermarkets still hadn’t figured this out.
They figured it out now. And if you… I mean, you could never… I’ve got friends who hate to go to wine shops, who hate to go to independent liquor stores because it’s just too much trouble when they can go to the supermarket and pick up whatever they need. And that includes wine. And if the wine sucks, it’s cheaper, they don’t care.
Michael Wangbickler:
Yeah, you know, wine suckage is as a matter of perception, right, because the fact is, is that there are wines out there that there are ten dollars or under that, I might not care for, but, you know, my mother loves or, you know, my cousin loves or what have you. So, you know, I’m very convinced that there’s a place in the market for every kind of wine, at every price point…
Jeff Siegel:
Oh, no, I agree…
Michael Wangbickler:
…every audience, right? But…
Jeff Siegel:
I agree completely. I just wish that we could get people – once they try a wine that’s super tasty because it’s smooth and fruity, which means sweet – that we could get them to try something else. That’s all I ask.
Michael Wangbickler:
Well, and I think that’s a natural progression for most wine drinkers and the fact is that there is no brand loyalty, very little brand loyalty in the wine business, right? I mean, there’s some you know, there are some people who are absolutely going to be [inaudible] drinkers or absolutely are going to be Beringer drinkers or what have you. But for the most part, people like the exploration that’s involved with wine, right?
Because they basically kind of says something new to try, I like that, where they’re from, they kind of take a little adventure through a glass, and so I don’t think that’s going to change at all. And in terms of like the influence of supermarkets, as opposed to independent retailers, again, like, you know, in any industry, there’s always, you know, you’ve got your top several players who dominate the market. I mean, you know, in the wine business, we know that, like, more than 50 percent of the wine is produced by three or four companies.
But the other but there’s a lot of room in that other 50 percent, right, and that there’s a lot of small independents and, you know, if you’re able to carve out a niche, you can be very successful. You don’t have to be a giant in business in order to do that.
Jeff Siegel:
No, and that’s a good point, because I know I’ve got a couple of producers, in fact, in California that I like a lot, I think, do a tremendous job, and one of them is fifty-thousand cases a year. I’ve said, “How do you, in California, how do you stay in business with fifty-thousand cases a year?” And the land is paid for, so that’s a…
Michael Wangbickler:
Yeah…
Jeff Siegel:
…that helps. But my concern, Mike, is that given land prices, particularly in California, but I’m told this is happening elsewhere in the world, how are these niche people going to be able to come in and make wine that’s affordable? And you don’t have to say my definition of affordability…
Michael Wangbickler:
Right… I was going to go there.
Jeff Siegel:
I’m ahead of you. If even allowing for affordable to be fifteen or twenty dollars, which is still higher than the average model, so how is it going to be room for these people in a business that is just so top-heavy?
Michael Wangbickler:
So really, this goes back to an earlier conversation we were having about how right now the younger generation, millennials, in particular, Gen Z, are really drinking less than their parents and their grandparents. But what they’re doing is they’re drinking it better, right? So, they may not be buying, you know, three bottles of ten-dollar wine, they may buy one bottle, 30-dollar fine wine instead, right?
That trend, I think, is going to continue, I think that people, that basically this – especially the next generations, you know, I think there’s a lot of misconception among certain marketers about how, like those generations, they want like the kind of cool and trendy and hip and, you know, to a certain extent that works for things like White Claw. But in addition, there’s that set they basically want to enjoy the finer things. They prefer experiences over stuff and what’s a better experience and having a great bottle of wine with some friends at a restaurant or out on the porch or what have you.
So, the trend that I see there is that I think that I think that some of the larger companies that are producing a lot of wine at a lower price point, they may struggle going forward, and I think you’re seeing some of them recognizing that fact, they’re going upmarket with several acquisitions of more premium brands and they’re starting to invest more in kind of the upper part of the market.
In terms of affordability that you just talked about, how affordable is subjective, right? You know, if you make a hundred thousand dollars a year, your affordability is a lot higher than somebody who makes twenty thousand dollars a year, so…
Jeff Siegel:
Yeah, they’re a winery that specializes in ten-dollar wines.
Michael Wangbickler:
[laughter]
Jeff Siegel:
And you know what? You just said something really smart there that I hadn’t thought about, Michael. So, the idea that about experience in wine, because you hear that a lot, and that’s one of the phrases in wine, I tune out because it’s stupid because most people don’t just say it, they don’t have any idea what it means. But what you just said, if you’re going to go to all the trouble to buy a 30-dollar bottle of wine or a twenty-dollar bottle of wine, you’re going to have to get involved in, for lack of a better term, all the crapola about wine.
And that means that you’re going to have to know why that 30-dollar bottle is 30 dollars and why the other bottle’s eight, or the other bottle’s 15. And that I think you’re right, I’ve never thought about that until just this moment, the light bulb goes off and I think you’ve come up with something there that really smart wine people are going to use to their advantage.
Michael Wangbickler:
Yeah, I mean, it’s something that we do for our clients, and that is that basically, you know, we’re giving them stories and giving them justifications behind those things, you know, showing why this is unique and why it’s worth the value. You know we use – we often use value – the term value – in a pejorative way to basically say that if something is value wine, it’s cheap…
Jeff Siegel:
[laughing] you’re right that…
Michael Wangbickler:
…it’s a synonym for cheap. The fact is, is that…[crosstalk]
Yeah, fact is that value, when you take it in a more global context, value is how much you think something is worth, right, to you as a person, right, and so the value of something really depends on you and what you feel is going to be good.
Jeff Siegel:
So that’s…
Michael Wangbickler:
Providing value to customers is paramount to whatever we do, regardless of at this point or any other product, we’re seeing that all over the board in terms of consumer behavior.
Jeff Siegel:
You know, that’s exactly – and I’ve argued that for years – just because the wine is cheap doesn’t mean it offers value.
Michael Wangbickler:
Right.
Jeff Siegel:
And just because a wine costs 80 bucks doesn’t mean it doesn’t offer value.
Michael Wangbickler:
Right.
Jeff Siegel:
We had a wine last night for dinner, a Portuguese wine, 20 bucks, and I was stunned at how wonderful it was. I think I’m going to do something on the blog about it because that is – that illustrates exactly the point you’re talking about. 20 bucks is a lot of money to me to pay for wine. But if I enjoy it, then it’s value.
Michael Wangbickler:
Yeah, you just don’t buy that other bottle of wine that you were going to buy for this week.
Jeff Siegel:
Right, exactly.
Michael Wangbickler:
Seriously. And then it comes down to like that’s a great example of QPR. We use the term QPR. You have Quality Price Ratio, right, so it really means like the value really is that Quality Price Ratio. If the Quality Price Ratio is high, then it’s a good value. If it’s low then it’s not, so… It really kind of comes down to what a particular person values.
Jeff Siegel:
So, it’s not like, you know, an 89-point wine costing sixty dollars?
Michael Wangbickler:
Well, you know, the thing is, is that 89 points given by one critic may be, you know, 95 by another. So, it really goes to, you know… One thing that I think that that few, few people recognize is the fact that a rating of a wine is a rating of that particular bottle from that particular vintage in that particular moment by one particular critic. Right?
Jeff Siegel:
Yes. I’m having my Fred Sanford moment… [laughter] [crosstalk]
Michael Wangbickler:
So, and we all know that wine evolves and changes from one year to the next, from one month to the next, one week to the next, right? So really what they’re doing is they’re capturing that wine in that moment, right? That doesn’t necessarily mean that that wine isn’t going to bloom and flower and become even better over the next several years, so like anything, ratings need to be taken in context, right?
So, they’re a basic kind of a good gauge, right, you know? When you, for instance, like when you go out to a restaurant, like for me and my wife, basically we’re looking at ratings on Yelp or on TripAdvisor. So, we say, “OK, well, this one says this is four stars, and this one says it’s four and a half stars. Is this four and a half star better than that one?” But then that leads to the questions of, “OK, it’s four and a half stars, sure. But are they actually creating the cuisine that I want to eat?” Right?
And it’s the same thing with a wine critic… it’s like just because somebody writes something is 95, doesn’t actually mean that that’s a great wine for you, right? Because it may not be in the style that you necessarily like. So again, those ratings are definitely necessary to give people a certain amount of background, but then it’s up to them to determine whether that aligns with their own values.
Jeff Siegel:
Scores, as much as I hate them are giving this a place to start, but the only way to learn about wine is to drink it. And I just wish more people understood that, too.
Michael Wangbickler:
Well, I mean, I think people are looking for… So, here’s the thing that to your point regarding earlier about like how the wine media has done an injustice to wine in general and wine criticism, in general, is the fact that – and I think wineries are also guilty of this – is making it a very exclusive product, making it a premium product that has to be controlled by certain… Illuminati, you know?
It’s the old Sommelier with the ashtray around… right? So, we’ve – I mean, honestly, you know, up until recently, we’ve done a terrible job of being able to communicate about wine and make it fun, as you mentioned earlier. So, and I think that that’s one of the reasons actually. I think that’s one of the reasons that the blog, the blogs emerged and, you know, people were starting to write about wine on their own because they wanted to, you know, share their own thoughts about these things and give their own opinions, and people will recognize that.
Jeff Siegel:
I have nothing against the democratization of wine criticism, and I honestly thought that it would make wine more popular and allow a way for more people to enjoy wine. And it didn’t work. And I think as Alder Yarrow…
Michael Wangbickler:
I don’t know if it didn’t… I don’t know if it didn’t work, I mean, I think there’s I mean, you know, wine is very… Wine… wine writing, wine criticism was very niche, right? You know, there’s not there aren’t that… I mean, the percentage of the population is going to be interested in reading a wine article is fairly small.
Jeff Siegel:
Very true.
Michael Wangbickler:
You know, it’s like the same kind of, you know, how many people want to read about a jig, you know, and woodworking, right, you know, it’s even smaller than… well, maybe not… than wine. So, it’s…. as long as people recognize the fact that it is a niche product and that you’re talking to a smaller type of audience, you can still be very successful in that environment because you just have to, you know, recognize that.
Jeff Siegel:
When I say democratization didn’t work, I think a couple of things happened why it didn’t work. I don’t… I think people went into it expecting to get a wider audience than they got and to be able to make money off of it. Everybody always asks me, “how do you start a wine blog?” And I always say, “make sure you have a real job first, and then eventually maybe you can win out”. And the other thing about it was once these people saw what was happening, they got out of it and…
Michael Wangbickler:
Well, yes and no, I mean some… I mean, the real power of a wine blog to a blogger basically, was it was a platform on which to launch their online careers in one way or another, right? And, you know…
Jeff Siegel:
[crosstalk] to let consumers know about Greenfly?
Michael Wangbickler:
Yeah, but I mean, no, because, I mean, you start a blog because you want to start a blog, right? Something that interests you and you want to just share it with whoever wants to read it. But some had the intention of like using it as a platform to go on to bigger and better things, and some people are very successful doing that. Other people didn’t have that interest, so they just kept writing whatever they did on their blog, some people just kind of dropped that whatever.
But, you know, there’s still new bloggers joining the discussion every day, you know? So, I’m going to the Wine Media Conference in August this year, which was once the Wine Bloggers Conference. You know, to me it’s actually going to be interesting to see, especially after a year of covid, to see how many new faces are there and how many new, kind of nascent wine writers are in the room. I think that’s actually kind of exciting.
Jeff Siegel:
You know, and it’s interesting you mention that, and that’s exactly to our point, I’ve offered several times and had discussions with them and submitted proposals to do a seminar on how to make money being a wine blogger. And, you know, they always put these to a vote among the conference attendees, but…
Michael Wangbickler:
They’re not interested.
Jeff Siegel:
Yeah, they weren’t interested in the least, and I’ve always thought that was really interesting because I know the organizers wanted me to do it. But…
Michael Wangbickler:
Yeah, well, it’s interesting because, you know, the Zephyr Adventures, who organizes that conference, they also organize a Food Blogging Conference, and it’s really interesting to see the differences between wine bloggers and food bloggers, because wine bloggers, yeah, they don’t really care about making money. They just they’re looking for an audience, they just want to enjoy it, they want to have a connection to the community basically and drink wine with great people.
Whereas in food blogging, yes, it’s very much the attention that they make money from their blogs through endorsements or through, you know, what have you – advertising, sponsorships, that sort of thing, and I think that’s the case. And a lot of different blogging areas and a lot of like, you know, quote-unquote, influencers, you know, they’re basically being paid to endorse particular products – wine people are generally not interested in that.
Jeff Siegel:
And that’s an interesting… That’s really… I’m going to have to think about that, that’s really an interesting approach to it, and that may explain why wine criticism is the way it is.
Michael Wangbickler:
Yeah, and I think it still suffers from a bit of a boy’s club, sort of feel like it’s exclusive, you know, if you don’t know the lingo, then you don’t belong, you know, if you don’t know, you know exactly what the Premier Cru vineyards in Burgundy are, then you’re less than a, you know, expert.
Jeff Siegel:
Don’t know which way the slope is and what the rocks are…
Michael Wangbickler:
Exactly. You know, we all know that that’s you know, there are very few people in the world who actually know all that information, but you don’t need to know that information to enjoy wine, so you don’t. Yeah. OK, so…
Jeff Siegel:
The guy you know who the person you know who does know it, if you have the question and the rest of it is you just sit there and drink what you enjoy.
Michael Wangbickler:
Yeah. So, anything else that we think in terms of future help, what the future looks like for wine journalism and for that matter, for public relations?
Jeff Siegel:
Oh, I, I think in all honesty, I think because so much of what I do, so many people, as Michael, as you just noted, do it and don’t expect to make any money off it because I do have a day job. I think the much more interesting thing is going to is happening is going to be what happens on the marketing side. And I think we saw a little bit of this with Rosé, with influencers and Instagram and stuff like that, which obviously was [inaudible], that was a little different. But I mean, are we going to start seeing this with the Premier Cru Burgundy and first-growth Bordeaux and all of that stuff where it will get away from all the old white guys and it will be people sitting there, you know, being Instagram influences or Tic-Tok influencers or whatever.
Michael Wangbickler:
I hope so, we definitely need to see… Have more disparate voices in the business, so something that we’ve talked about on this podcast previously and I hope that we continue to have that conversation…
Jeff Siegel:
Although first-growth Bordeaux on Tik Tok to me would be a tremendous thing to see.
Michael Wangbickler:
Oh, I might know somebody.
Jeff Siegel:
[laughing] So let’s do it. Let’s set it up!
Michael Wangbickler:
Yeah, OK, on that note, we’ll wrap it up here, and I want to thank you, Jeff, for being on the show, it’s been a great show, great conversation. I think maybe we have to pick this up at some other time, talk a little bit more about it, so…
Jeff Siegel:
Thank you so much, Michael no, it was great, I enjoyed it, and again, we need to do this much more often, it’s always so good to talk to you because you’re just so smart about wine. I don’t talk to enough people anymore who are smart about wine.
Michael Wangbickler:
Thankfully, I get to talk to a lot of people who are smart about wine, so that’s definitely a perk of my job. So, thanks again, and for my listeners, we will see you next week.
