The Fizz #63: Karen MacNeil spent eight unpaid years writing The Wine Bible. Today, it's in its 3rd edition.
Karen and I speak about her upbringing, why The Wine Bible's first edition took eight years to write, and the wine questions that still keep her up at night.
It’s more than likely you’re already deeply familiar with today’s interviewee. Karen MacNeil authored a wine book that has been a staple of every wine lover’s bookcase. The Wine Bible is a compendium of wine knowledge written by an influential and relatable voice in our industry, an excellent way for wine lovers to start learning about wine, and a constant reference point for many writers. The market agrees—The Wine Bible has sold over one million copies and has started many wine industry folks on their career paths, myself included.
For the 63rd issue of The Fizz, I got to speak with Karen about her upbringing, the process of writing The Wine Bible and releasing its third edition, and what has changed in the industry since the first release in 2000.
Margot: I'd love to hear about your upbringing. Did you grow up in wine?
Karen: No, I did not grow up in wine. Very few Americans of my age would've grown up in wine because our parents and grandparents were around during the Prohibition. Then during World War II, cocktails and spirits were very big. For my part, I grew up in a poor Irish Catholic family and ran away from home at a very early age, at fourteen, and never went back. By about fifteen though, I was having a glass of wine every night as I did my homework. I was a really good student. I was the valedictorian of my high school, but I suppose my love of wine began then. Of course I was drinking really humble wines—89 cent Bulgarian red I think was the highlight of my evening.
Margot: Wow. How did you get into wine at such an early age?
Karen: As many people who love wine will recognize, once you start drinking wine, it can sort of mysteriously take over. It's such an emotional beverage and it's also an intellectual beverage. You're drawn into wanting to know more and more and more about it. We all have that phrase—"bitten by the wine bug”, and I think it's true. Nobody falls out of love with wine, but everybody falls in eventually.
For me, having started very humbly, I eventually moved to New York to try and become a writer. I collected 324 rejection slips, but eventually my first article sold, which was on food, to the Village Voice in the early 1970s. That was the door that opened up food writing. Then from food writing, I went to my great love, which is wine writing.
Margot: I remember reading something that said the first article you sold was on butter. Was it kind of like, let me get into the writing world however I can and then I'll make it to wine? Or was food your initial interest?
Karen: No, I love to write about food too. In those days, I was really poor in New York City. I was actually on food stamps. I was writing about everything—women's issues, poetry, politics, just all kinds of things. I had this bright idea one day that if I tried to write about food, maybe people would give you samples of it. I thought about it in a very selfish way, but it turned out that I loved writing about food and eventually became fairly good at it and was writing about food for the New York Times and lots of other magazines. Eventually I was able to learn enough about wine to begin writing about it too.
Margot: Gotcha. How did The Wine Bible come about?
Karen: Most books are long and often crushingly disappointing processes of coming up with an idea, writing a proposal, trying to get an agent, and then pitching and pitching and pitching that proposal to different publishing houses. In my case, The Wine Bible came about in a really surprising way because one day I was sitting in my office, which was in the second bedroom in my apartment in New York, and working away on an article, and the phone rang and it was Peter Workman.
Peter Workman was a legendary person in New York in those days. He was considered one of the great publishers, and he said, hello, this is Peter Workman. Do you want to have lunch? I nearly fell off my chair because I knew who he was, but I certainly never expected to meet him. So I said yes. We went to lunch that day and he had just read a piece that I had written in the New York Times Magazine, the day before the Sunday magazine section. Of all things, it was on lobster rolls.
He said, I really like your writing style. What book have you always wanted to write? This is like the wine person's equivalent of sitting on a stool in Hollywood and being discovered by Steven Spielberg or something. Workman was famous in those days for cookbooks, especially the Silver Palate Cookbook, which had been a big success for them. I said actually I'd like to write a book about wine. He said, hmm, we've never published a book on wine, but okay, can you have it done in a year? I said absolutely, and ten years later, The Wine Bible was done, in eight years of actual writing.
Then it takes a publisher a year and a half or almost two years to produce a big book like that.
Margot: What gave you the understanding that there was space for such a comprehensive, but also, such an approachable book?
Karen: I had tried to teach myself wine by reading other writers, and much of the most authoritative writing was done by British writers, all of whom it seemed like had gone to Oxford or Cambridge. I had never even taken a writing class and that kind of writing was stilted, dry, very formal, really stripped away from art and culture and food, and it was just hell to read. It was really hard to learn about wine.
No American had tackled a really big book like this, and I was soon to discover why. The first edition of The Wine Bible was written before the internet. If there was no internet, how would you find out a fact, like how many winemakers there are in Hungary? Where would you even start? One of the reasons that the first edition took eight years for me to write is because everything that I wrote was researched by either being there, by phone, or by fax.
There was nothing that you could look up really quickly. Wineries didn't have websites, and in the very beginning days of the internet, websites were not considered by publishers to be valid fact checking sources. By the time that first edition was done, I had probably forty square feet stacked three feet high of file boxes with faxes organized from around the world. That was eight unpaid years. How many people have the determination—the stubbornness—to go that long on a project, work that hard without pay? I didn't really have competition, I think in part because it was so hard to do.
Margot: Where do you think that determination comes from? Have you always been a very determined person?
Karen: Yeah, I guess I have always been a determined person. I like working on projects where nothing existed before, and you create the what is. I developed the wine program at the Culinary Institute of America out here in the Napa Valley, which, at its height was a really big program. I don't know what it is about my personality, but I am pretty determined.
Margot: How did you go about compiling all of the information in your books? Did you start out with connections in every region? Did you have to find out who these people were?
Karen: Regions that you could travel to—and I did travel to almost every wine region in the world—that became the good first step because you would come home with a big Rolodex of names that you could rely on. One person would lead you to another person, would lead you to another person, and sometimes it would take twenty times of going from one person to the next before you would find the person who actually knew what you were trying to find out! When I think about writers and journalists today, it’s a thousand times easier to find information. If I hadn't been to a region yet and I had no contacts and no six degrees of separation, I would call the embassy.
I remember calling the Hungarian Embassy and asking who in the diplomatic world knows about Hungarian agriculture and can they get me to someone who knows about Hungarian viticulture? I just found one of these old faxes from the Hungarian embassy saying, oh my God, it's the wine lady calling again, which is sort of sweet.
Margot: That's awesome. When you started writing that book, were you already considered a wine expert? How did you learn what you needed to know to write this comprehensive book?
Karen: It took me a long time, and in general, I think it takes women a longer time than men to make a pronouncement, a noun, about what you are. I was really a pretty well published writer for years before The Wine Bible. It took me a long time—I had taught one hundred wine classes before I was able to say I'm a wine educator or a wine expert.
Wine is not immediately knowable. In fact, part of the wonderful aspect about it is that you're on that gerbil wheel of learning for the rest of your life.
Margot: You mentioned gender differences—in the ten years that it took to make The Wine Bible, did you come up on any challenges because of your gender going through all these different regions asking questions? Or did you feel pretty accepted throughout?
Karen: No, no, no. Women still have a very hard time in the wine industry. There are a lot more women in the wine industry today, thankfully. For most of my early adult life, I was almost always the only woman in the room. The better the wine, the rarer it would be for a woman to be in the room. If you were tasting old Bordeaux at a famous chateau, you can bet that there would be thirty men and me.
Was that a disadvantage? In some ways it was occasionally an advantage, but in most ways, you had to work faster, better, harder, be more creative. In the eighties and nineties, the competition among writers to write for various magazines was fierce. For some reason, men were just automatically considered to possess more expertise than women. In the eighties, for example, even magazines like Vogue and Good Housekeeping, which you would think would logically have a woman writer, had men writers when it came to wine. That's no news to any woman—that's often what you simply have to do.
Margot: The Wine Bible is now out in its third edition, and I’m seeing much more USA coverage in this edition, which I love. What has changed in the landscape of American winemaking since that first edition?
Karen: I think what has changed is not just that winemaking has gotten better—it most certainly has, but the whole world of wine in the United States has expanded greatly. I mean, in 1965, there were no wineries in Oregon. Now there are close to a thousand wineries in Oregon. There were probably fifteen or so wineries in Washington and they're well over a thousand wineries in Washington state now.
New York had wine, San Francisco had wine, L.A. had a little bit of wine. In lots of places in the middle of the country, there often wouldn't even be a wine list in a restaurant. What has changed is not just that there's more winemaking and better winemaking, but there's a whole culture of wine in America now, right? There are wine bars all over the place and wine savvy restaurants all over the place, hundreds of sommeliers and thousands of people enrolled in WSET. There was absolutely none of that in the late seventies and early eighties.
Margot: As you've gone through the process of these three editions, what have been some of the challenges you've come across, and what have been some of the unexpected joys of that process?
Karen: You know, there aren't many globalists left in wine writing, almost everyone has become a specialist. Because the world of wine is so big, now the sheer number of countries that you have to have a grasp of is enormous. One of the joys is seeing, oh I see why Australia does X because South Africa did y. Shiraz went from South Africa to Australia, right? It's making these big global connections of how the entire world works, which you can't really see unless you are a globalist, because if you're deep into your area—you know a lot about New Zealand Pinot Noir and you are the expert on New Zealand Pinot Noir, that’s deep fantastic knowledge, but it’s hard to make these big mega connections about how wine itself evolved and moved through cultures. I love stuff like that.
One of the hard things is—I'm one of those people who, if you want to get something done, you know, give it to a busy woman. Also if you think that this is going to be really hard to find out, give it to me. So when I come across something that I keep looking and looking and looking and there's no answer, I will just keep going. I've been looking now for years for the answer to two questions.
One, I sort of have an answer for, but the other I don't, which is—when did cases begin? Every day, wine is delivered in cases in a three by four configuration. Why do cases contain twelve bottles? Why the three by four configuration? Who did that? I know when cylindrical bottles were standardized, and first used. That is in Porto in Portugal, 1789 or so. But when did cases begin? I’m still looking.
The other question is—why are there white wine glasses? White wine glasses should not exist. It's absurd. There are two theories there probably. One is that white wines may have historically been considered lesser than red wines. Women drank white wine often, and so maybe a glass should be smaller to be lesser like a woman. You can imagine how that goes over with me. The other explanation may be that in days before refrigeration, where wines would've just been brought up from the coldest part of the house, usually the basement, you wanted to pour small amounts and refill a glass more often just to maintain whatever coldness the bottle itself could hold.
Margot: You've dedicated a major portion of your life to the study of wine. Why is wine important today?
Karen: You could argue that it's actually more important than ever because, having all of us still in the pandemic right now, wine is way that brings people together, and it's so effortless in a way. With a complete stranger, you can share a bottle of wine and you are absolutely not a stranger at the end of that. There's a reason why wine evokes emotion and was the historic beverage of religion. There's really nothing like it.
It's astounding because, it’s the simple fact of grapes, which are just a fruit. Yet wine has all of these abilities to bring us together, to make us feel good, to intellectually captivate us. It's really astounding that one substance can do all of this, but it has done it for well, about 9,000 years.
I don't think wine has ever lost its importance. It's just a matter of getting more and more people to participate in how wonderful it is. I can't even imagine a life without wine.
Margot: That’s amazing. Where do you find your joy in the work that you do, as a writer or wine educator?
Karen: Doing the work is itself joyful. I love the process of writing. I love the process of tasting wine. I love the frustrating process of trying to put wine into words. Wine is so much harder to write about than food. Trying hard to do that and to do it in a way that really is unique where people would say, oh my God this so beautifully captures this wine. The work of doing that is very sustaining.
You can support Karen MacNeil by purchasing The Wine Bible Third Edition (give it as a gift to a wine lover), signing up for WineSpeed, her weekly wine newsletter, and following her on Instagram. You can find her wine glasses at her shop.
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