Why “Fermentations” Doesn’t Offer Wine Reviews
I woke up today to an email in my inbox that asked a question that has now been asked of me exactly 8 times via email. Each time I’ve received such a question, I’ve sent back a response personally to the email, rather than address it in the blog. Eight, being a fairly round number, I thought now would be an appropriate time to answer the question in the blog space.
This morning’s email from "Claude" who lives in northern France. He asks:
"Tom, I enjoy reading fermentations each day. But why don’t you review wines? I want to learn more about California wines a lot."
The simple answer is: there are far more people and places on the internet, if that’s your medium of choice, to find well written, informative wine reviews that reflect deep palate experience than I could ever offer.
I’ve been tasting wines regularly now since 1989. I still taste a lot of wine. I taste a lot of Pinots and, thanks to my beautiful wife, I taste a lot of wines with cute animals on the label also. Furthermore, in the course of working for various clients I write descriptions of wines that show up in newsletters, on back labels, on "wine data sheets" and elsewhere. Yet, those are mainly descriptions that are written with sales and marketing in mind.
I’ve always believed that the most reliable, the best, the most relevant wine reviews come from those who are truly passionate about the art of wine reviewing and whom dedicate themselves to it by constantly seeking context for the wines they review.
I’m not quite there.
In addition, before beginning blogging, I looked around the world of blogs, wine and otherwise, and tried to determine which type were best. It struck me that those I liked most were blogs that came out of a bloggers area of expertise and those that had a relatively narrow focus. My area of expertise is wine marketing and public relations. So, I set out to try to stay focused on that in my blog not only to carve out a niche for Fermentations, but also to indulge in the kind of writing that interests me.
There are a number of wine bloggers who I think write terrific reviews of wine. It’s probably because they are really passionate about the idea of describing wine and about passing on discoveries to others. Alder, Lenn, Christian, and Beau all write beautiful reviews.
This is why I don’t use fermentations to write reviews of wine.
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