The No-Wine Magazine

In my “miscellaneous” file – by far the most bulging in my cabinet – I have a check stub. Now, I’m not a check stub-saving sort. I cash my checks, spend the dough, and move on looking for my next financial killing. Stubs are literally worthless. I toss ’em.But I have kept one stub. It comes from the New Yorker magazine and reads “Kill Fee – $15,000.” It’s not every day that a wine writer (or any other sort, for that matter) sees a check for 15 grand, let alone as a fee for the acceptance of a story that the publication has no intention of using. It was for a profile of Italian winegrower Angelo Gaja commissioned by then editor Robert Gottlieb and discarded by succeeding editor Tina Brown along, I’m told, with a lot of other pieces commissioned by Mr. Gottlieb. If it had run, it would have been the first substantial wine writing in The New Yorker for many years.I thought of this check stub when I picked up the September 5 New Yorker, called “The Food Issue.” I groaned inwardly because I knew what was coming – or rather, not coming. Once again there would be nothing about wine in the magazine. This from a publication that, more than any other, sees itself as an arbiter of sophistication.Actually, there was something about wine: There were three wine advertisements. The back cover is a full-page ad for Turning Leaf (owned by Gallo). Chateau Ste. Michelle winery (owned by U.S. Tobacco Co.) took another full-page ad. There was also a small, three-inch long ad from Bonny Doon Vineyard, which is owned by one of America’s more bizarre marketing geniuses, Randall Grahm.A winemaker with a doctorate in philosophy, Mr. Grahm comes up with goofy labels like Le Cigare Volante, a Rhone-style red wine whose label celebrates an ordinance passed in the 1950s in Chateauneuf-du-Pape which forbids landing rights for flying saucers (which the French call “flying cigars”).However oddball he may seem, Mr. Grahm knows how to sell. Bonny Doon’s yearly production makes his winery the 28th largest in the country according to Wine Business Monthly, with an estimated yearly production of 365,000 cases. It’s bigger than, say, the well-known sparkling wine producer Domaine Chandon.Anyway, that was the full extent of the wine presence in the New Yorker’s latest annual food issue. This is nothing new. There’s almost never any mention of wine in the New Yorker. And when it occurs, it’s almost always sneering.You don’t believe me? Try this from one of the New Yorker’s undoubtedly best writers, Adam Gopnik, in last year’s annual food issue musing at length about wine writing: “Remarkably, nowhere in wine writing…would a Martian learn that the first reason people drink wine is to get drunk. … Wine is what gives us a reason to let alcohol make us happy without one. Without wine lore, and wine tasting, and wine talk, and wine labels, and, yes, wine writing and rating – the whole elaborate idea of wine – we would still get drunk, but we would be merely drunk.”How’s that for a sophisticated analysis of wine appreciation? We drink wine to get drunk. We choose wine, rather than the much more economical and fast-acting booze, out of sheer pretension. A similar depth of art appreciation would have us viewing paintings as nothing more than a way to look at naked women.What is it about wine and the New Yorker? Two years before Mr. Gopnik’s assertion came Calvin Trillin’s gleeful (and, of course, always witty) examination of the not-quite-fact that some wine drinkers cannot distinguish a red wine from a white when they can’t see the color of the wine.This is not really true, which Mr. Trillin eventually concedes only in the final paragraph of the piece. “I concluded that experienced wine drinkers can tell red from white by taste about 70% of the time, as long as the test is being administered by someone who isn’t interested in trying to fool them.”These two articles, both denigrating, constitute pretty much everything the New Yorker has published on wine in recent years, never mind that the latest food issue is an ongoing enterprise of several years standing. Wine is worse than esoteric or even unimportant. Wine and its culture smack of fraudulence. (Mr. Gopnik again: “The end of wine writing is to turn drinking into a metaphor for judging. Since we know that this is false, we feel the falsity, and the pathos of the falsity.”)I mention all this because it’s not insignificant that a magazine such as the New Yorker steadfastly refuses to address the cultural significance of wine in American life. Worse, it indulges in a double whammy, reverse flippancy that scoffs at wine as having any substance at all.I was reminded of historian Richard Hofstadter’s succinct definition of the key word in the title of his landmark book “Anti-Intellectualism in American Life” (1963): “The common strain that binds together the attitudes and ideas which I call anti-intellectual is a resentment and suspicion of the life of the mind and of those who are considered to represent it; and a disposition constantly to minimize the value of that life.”Wine is more than a fancy way of getting drunk. There is, in fact, a “wine mind.” It’s been present for centuries, first in Europe and now in America. And there is, even more so, a “wine life,” a culture and a form of civilization that has recently put down its deepest-ever roots in modern American life.The evidence is all around us. Wine has become normal in American life. That alone is a far-reaching change. Its economics are considerable, worth $33 billion a year in California alone in wages, revenues, and economic activity. Every state in the nation now boasts wineries. Its issues reach the U.S. Supreme Court, such as the recent matter of interstate wine shipping.Wine is increasingly intrinsic, and informing, to American culture. Yet the New Yorker continues to believe otherwise, engaging in an odd defiance – either through a willful silence or an occasional fling of the mud of disdain – of one of the more significant transformations of modern America.It’s too bad for we writers (I enjoyed spending that 15 grand), but it’s really a loss for readers everywhere including, yes, the New Yorker itself.

The No-Wine Magazine

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