Will Wine Talk Survive?

Wine talk happens in many contexts and performs a variety of functions. Sometimes we talk about wine just to communicate our pleasure in what we drink or to worn people about what to avoid. Of course wine talk is important for people to carry out the business of wine.

But for much wine talk the subtext—the unspoken or less obvious message—is about love and desire, aspirations and frustrations, ideas, judgments, and connections made and broken. Wine lovers use wine to explore their social world; for many of us, wine constitutes our social world. For the most committed, or should I say obsessed, wine provides a set of experiences and practices that pervade one’s life. It is the ether in which we live and without wine talk we would be mute and incapable of self-expression.

But even for the less obsessed, wine talk articulates the values and norms of the wine world. Without wine talk, the wine world would have little direction, no sense of what is worthy or unworthy and why. Our forgetfulness would make the ongoing repetitions and habits that sustain the meaning of wine difficult to maintain. Every self-sustaining community needs to talk.

Of course part of that wine talk is talk about wine talk. We love to complain about it. Everyone wishes it more precise or more poetic, less laden with jargon or more efficient, less ideological or less vacillating, just the facts or let subjectivity reign.

But these debates and the contradictory demands are necessary. Without them wine talk could not articulate the values and norms of the wine world. It would fail in its mission.

As wine journalism’s demise continues apace, blogs move behind paywalls or migrate to Substack, and Twitter becomes a playground for the rich and ignorant, I wonder how wine talk will survive. (Posting photos on Instagram doesn’t seem up to the task of articulation.)