WineInk: It’s a process

I’m on a deadline.

My somewhat patient editor at The Aspen Times is awaiting a column from me. And here I sit in a hotel room in Paso Robles, California, hoping the glass of wine in my hand will provide me with inspiration and clarity about what to write about this week for WineInk.

You may think it’s easy, coming up with 800 to 1,000 words or so every week about wine. You may think that life is all about tasting great bottles, talking to interesting people, going to spectacular places, and studying beautiful books. But the fact is, it’s hard work. Not boot packing the Highland Bowl hard work or picking grapes in the pre-dawn darkness hard work, but still …

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I have been writing this column every week for nearly 900 weeks, or since the spring of 2007 when WineInk made its debut thanks to the suggestion of the then Aspen Times editor Bob Ward who thought the community might like a wine column. And each week since then, there comes a moment or more where I feel a sense of angst about having to sit down and actually produce some cogent thoughts on wine.

Don’t get me wrong: There are plenty of wine stories to write to fill up 52 columns each year. Actually, more than enough if I think about it in those terms. But every once in a while, especially when I’m on the road, with a deadline at hand, the process can be a bit overwhelming.

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Basically, the drill is this: I write down a plan each month with four stories. The stories come to me in different ways. Maybe I drank a bottle of wine that was interesting, perhaps I received an email from a winery about something unique that they are doing. I could have gone to a winemakers’ dinner and been smitten by the wines or the winemaker’s tales of toiling in a particular vineyard. Maybe there has been the release of a new study about the effects of wine on the metabolism that has caught my eye or there could have been a change in the weather in a particular wine region that has affected the growing season … whatever.

Anyway, I have a list of things to research each month.

I create a template for notes on each subject, and then, as the month rolls on, I conduct interviews, read articles, and go through wine books for research. Oh, and I taste wines. Lots of them.

The tasting is what everyone considers to be the reason people get into wine writing. And they’re right. People who take four to six hours each week to sit down and pen a column about wine (a quaint euphemism for the process of typing on an electronic keyboard) generally, really like to drink wine. I, myself, plead guilty to this obsession. As a result, I taste/drink wine, if not every day, then conservatively 9 out of every 10 days. And I love it. I rarely drink dreck, and the diversity of wines that I taste makes them forever compelling and, in a word, tasty.

But even more enjoyable than tasting is the opportunity that writing this column affords me regularly to talk with winemakers and people in the industry. Wine folk are amongst the most interesting folk in the world. Think about it. Winemakers make stuff.

They work hand in hand with nature for six months to coax nutrients out of the ground, into a vine — many that are older than the winemaker him or herself — to produce plump clusters and bunches of grapes. Then they wait until the exact moment when sun, wind, rain, and fog have coalesced to create just the perfect synergy of sugars in the berries, so that they can swiftly harvest them and get the grapes into a winery where the alchemy that will eventually produce magic in a bottle begins.

Then there is the travel. As I have said before in this space, great grapes grow in great places. The coast of California, the Okanagan Valley of British Columbia, Burgundy and Alsace in France, Piemonte and Tuscany in Italy, the Margaret River, and Mornington Peninsula in Australia. These are places of great physical beauty, and I have, as a result of writing about wine, been able to see the sights, smell the smells, and taste the wines in all of these places. Truly blessed is all I can say about that.

And, of course, there is the research. My day job involves working on the television production of NFL Football broadcasts. Thursday Night Football on Amazon to be precise. In that capacity, I devour internet information, press releases, and articles obsessively.

Wine writing requires much the same. Learning about a grape — the region it’s from, the people who make the wines, and the best vintages — is a lot like researching a player, where he came from, how he works with a particular coach, and which situations he is most effective in. The process is strikingly similar in both sports and wine.

So, as I sit here in Paso Robles, my morning glass of wine finished, and my navel-gazing nearly complete, I guess I have to say that, yeah, the wine writing life is all about tasting great bottles, talking to interesting people, going to spectacular places, studying beautiful books.

And it sure doesn’t suck. Thanks for your indulgence.