Where is the Curated Consumer Wine News?

One of my greatest frustrations these days is that it is nearly impossible to watch any news channel or listen to any talk radio that does not constantly discuss presidential/Washington politics. This mono focus is oppressive and does Americans no favors given the huge number of important issues and topics from around the country and world that impact us. However, thankfully, the wine media and reporting does not have such a problem.

Most remarkable about the wine media and wine news coverage is that it is so diverse. If you are interested, you can find coverage of regions, wine types and winemaking. You can indulge in wine business news. You can follow numerous sources of wine ratings and scores. You can find profiles of winemakers and winery owners. You can read and watch wine education information. It’s all there.

A great part of this wealth of wine news resources has to do with the ease of publishing today. While a great deal can be spent to develop a digital website for dispensing information, it’s just as easy to spend very little on a very efficient information delivery platform. This was not the case in the early 2000s, the 1990s and earlier.

The real problem is tracking down and gathering all the wine information you want. There are of course a number of sites that curate wine information, and this is particularly the case if you are interested in trade and business-related wine news. Wine Business, Wine Industry Insight, and Wine Industry Advisor all do an excellent job at delivering a curated selection of wine trade news on a daily basis.

But what’s most odd is that there is no daily email curating consumer-facing wine articles, videos and other content. This is surprising insofar as there are clearly more consumers reading wine content on the internet. On the other hand, an extensive well-curated consumer wine news email, updated daily, is a very difficult and time-consuming project. It’s not enough to automatically grab a few RRS feeds.

Something like this that is well done would truly curate the information, carefully choosing which content is essential, making sure news isn’t duplicated, categorizing the content and links, and looking to deliver information from a diverse set of sources.

The American news media and news channels seem in large part to be lost causes, focused almost entirely on Trump and elections, leaving aside reporting on economics, healthcare, science, etc. What’s interesting is that it is the legacy networks (CBS, NBC and ABC), rather than the cable news channels, that do the best job of delivering balanced news reporting with the nightly newscasts.

Wouldn’t it be nice for a person with an editor’s mindset to begin delivering consumers something of a nightly newscast for wine. If done in anything close to a balanced and comprehensive manner, my bet is they’d end up with a large audience and a business.

Posted In: Wine Media

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5 Responses

  1. Sean - February 14, 2020

    Tom, don’t you remember, I pitched this to you when we met about WineConsumer?

  2. Douglas Trapasso - February 15, 2020

    Vinography has an excellent weekly post linking articles that cover Le Industry along with some helpful consumer news and good old fashioned industry dish:

    http://www.vinography.com/archives/2020/02/wine_news_what_im_reading_the_242.html

  3. Alfonso Cevola - February 16, 2020

    I agree, Tom. what is needed is a site that isn’t just the inside baseball (industry wonk) stuff…

  4. Mark Lenzi - February 17, 2020

    Tom, Its nice you bring up this issue. Being in the industry daily I review a lot of industry news sources, From that I create my own industry newsletter that I can share with my customers. I feel its important as a wine retailer to give customers information whats going on in the wine world. Also keeping up with the latest news and trends sets small business apart for the “big guys”. Content is at http://www.thewonderfulworldofwine.education

  5. 20bet - September 13, 2023

    Your article gave me a lot of inspiration, I hope you can explain your point of view in more detail, because I have some doubts, thank you.


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