The Fizz #81: Meg Maker lobbies for greater diversity and personality in wine writing
Wine writer, researcher, and educator Meg Maker talks to me about how wine communication has changed, the subjectivity of tasting notes, and the future of wine writing.
Talking about writing with other writers, especially wine writers, is an incredibly liberating experience for me. To me, writing about wine is writing about people—their goals, their dreams, their challenges, their environment. It’s writing about my own upbringing and the changes I’ve gone through. It touches on politics, communication style, social norms. No-one understands this better than Meg Maker, who has been writing about wine writing and communication for over 15 years. Meg’s focus on how wine communication has evolved has given her a keen eye on how we speak about wine, and what that means for wine culture.
In this issue, Meg and I talk about the evolution of tasting notes and wine language, how wine critics end up being wine marketers, and the ways wine media and wine writing has changed. This conversation was a breath of fresh air and inspiration to me personally, as a writer and a wine lover.
Margot: I'd love to start with your upbringing—was wine a part of your life when you were a child?
Meg: Not at all. I grew up in Central Maine in Waterville. It's a college town. My parents were working professionals. Mom was an artist and a school teacher, dad worked in the radio doing spots for local ads. I was a quiet, scholastic kid, very dutiful, youngest of three, only girl. I had some health problems when I was a kid, which bumped me up against my mortality really early and made me aware of my physical fragility.
I was interested in nature, but not really allowed to ramble in nature much. Very interested in gardening, but my family were not gardeners. Interested in food, but my family were not foodies. My parents only ever had wine on special occasions, and it was a gallon of Gallo white burgundy, or did they call it Chablis at the time?
I assimilated the attitude that food was nourishment. My mother did a very good job as a full time working professional putting food on the table. We were of French Canadian heritage. I have the culinary traditions of Acadian cooking in my blood, but I didn't learn to cook. I was actually adamantly against learning to cook because I was told you have to learn to cook because you're a girl. I was not participating in that very gendered construction.
In college, I really didn't drink at all. I didn't do drugs. I became vegetarian and that forced me to learn to cook, and it was through food experiences that I started discovering agriculture. I remember this moment of chopping mushrooms. They were just white button mushrooms, but I was 18 years old. I had never done this before. It was this gobsmacking aesthetic experience, just slicing into a really fresh mushroom and the color, the fragrance, the shape. It was truly like epiphanic for me.
I taught myself to cook by reading cookbooks cover to cover. Then I spent a year abroad in London and then in Italy. I experienced as much of the cuisine and the culture as I could. My father in law from my first marriage was a casual wine drinker with dinner. That made me realize that wine could be part of the table. It wasn't “the demon liquid”, or “the demon rum” as the as the abolitionists called everything. It reduced the stigma. In the French working class during the early 20th century, there was a lot of alcoholism. I absorbed the message that alcohol was dangerous, it would break apart families, it was dangerous even to experiment with.
Margot: How did you overcome that message?
Meg: Honestly, I still kind of haven’t. I think it is part of who I am. I think it's important to be constantly mindful of the intoxicating effects of something that I am at the same time aesthetically and culturally really jazzed about.
Margot: Absolutely. I had this thought process a few years ago when I had a stomach ulcer and I went to the hospital and they said, how much do you drink? And I said, oops, not a little! And they said, okay, well you better cut it down. It spurred me into this existential place—I am advocating for and I make money off of something that can cause people harm. How do you reconcile those things?
Meg: Definitely. I did work work as a wine marketer for a couple of years. I worked for Bonny Doon vineyard for Randall Graham, which was a great education. I think everyone who communicates about wine professionally should work for a family winery at some point, because you get this view of the industry that I think is inaccessible otherwise, really invaluable time for me.
But at this time, I have zero interest in marketing wine, selling wine, promoting wine. That's part of why I've shifted my focus toward wine writing. I've become a meta commentator about the discipline. I wrote about wine writing as soon as I started writing about wine in 2008. As early as 2012, I was publishing articles about wine writing. I'm also interested in research, looking at the impact, history, and trajectory of English language wine communications. Mostly in North America over the last 50 years, you see how the heavily descriptive olfactory lavish tasting notes that became ascendant in the latter part of the 20th century tipped over into wine marketing.
You come up in this environment where you become familiar with the vernacular of a domain of a discipline, and that vernacular, in this case is very heavily descriptive heavily olfactory and very floral. That all became absorbed by wine marketing. Now there are academics looking at how critics—although nominally we're critiquing this consumer product, what we often end up doing is selling it. We're using very evocative and persuasive language to promote the fine qualities of the beverage, and we're rarely—I mean, how often do you see a score that's below 85? You never see a score below 85. They're not even published.
So we end up with an entire industry discourse that becomes about promoting, marketing, and selling wine. Even the critics are promoting, marketing, and selling wine. They profit off that endeavor through putting their score on it. Some reviewers are notoriously generous in their scores. I'm not going to name names, but we all know who they are. Some are notoriously parsimonious. There was a modernization phase, and then a high mannerism phase, and now it's really reached a kind of Baroque phase where I think we're in a tipping point. We're ready for some change to happen in wine commentary. We're really ripe for it.
Margot: When I think about wine tasting notes, I think of this period where tasting notes were quite dry and exclusive. That has made way in the last few years where tasting notes were very loose and creative. Oh, this tastes like sitting on the moon in a cowboy hat in the night, right? Now it seems we’re starting to pull back from that. What does a good tasting note look like to you from the point of a consumer, because those kinds of notes weren't written for an early stage consumer. They were written for us. We know what a Grenache from California tastes like generally, and the moon cowboy thing, it's fun and we get it, right? But for the consumer, what does a good tasting note look like now?
Meg: Well, the shift you point out from the dry tasting note to the more metaphorical, evocative, analogous tasting note I think happened over the last 40 or 50 years. We go back to UC Davis, Maynard Amarine, Ann Noble, they started seeing some of this metaphorical and analogous writing creep into popular wine commentary. Even the writing around the Judgment of Paris, you find actually very few descriptors, but you do start seeing commentators introducing some of those metaphorical, coquettish, jokey tones—they're personifying the wine.
This was actually fairly new in the mid 50s, 60s, 70s. Amarine and Noble and other scientists decided that they wanted to apply more rigorous codified language to wine tasting notes. They issued a grid of things that were in bounds and things that were out of bounds. Noble focused on aroma. The aroma wheel was the result of that. There were a few critics who embraced that and really did try to pare back, or worked in a very spare way of describing the wines.
Frank Prial, who had a good long run as a critic for the New York Times, you really have to rummage through years of his columns to come up with anything that resembles a fruit or aroma kind of tasting note. He just avoided it all together. Instead, what those commentators focused on, Prial and others of his ilk, were the wine's context, its overall impact, not even talking about its organoleptic qualities. It wasn’t like they were emphasizing texture over flavor and aroma. They were talking more about the producer, about its typicity, about the cultural context, about how you serve it, about the restaurant context, whatever it was. Prial actually has a few columns where he's actively denigrating more floral language.
Then you have someone like Parker burst on the scene, and he masterfully dominated that profuse tasting note. And it really took off. It was a hit. Parker was positioning himself as the consumer reports of wine. He wanted to be objective. Ironically, so did Noble and Amerine. They wanted to be objective in the description of the wine, but Parker was doing it from a more poetic perspective, rather than a more codified strict lexical perspective.
Then in the meantime, wine was becoming professionalized. The rise of the sommelier class for example. Wine as our cuisine became more international, as dining became more of something that the middle class would do as an entertainment. As cooking became ascendant, cooking shows, the popularity of cuisine meant that there was just a lot more wine writing, a lot more food writing happening. That lavish style was fun and it kind of de-stuffified everything. But then as wine became professionalized, training programs got stood up—WSET, Master of Wine Program and the Guild. They had to have codified lexical terms, but then they became even bigger and bigger.
So it wasn't just chemical and straight organoleptics about the wine. It added more flavor descriptors to the point where you get not just citrus, it's lime, or kumquat, or orange, the peel or the zest? You have to know these things in order to pass the tests. You have to use their terminology. Wine writers have trained readers to expect olfactory flavor descriptors in a tasting note. When I pour wine for people, they reach for flavor descriptors. They believe that is the way one talks about wine. That is the way that one understands wine is through language. First and foremost, and through descriptive olfactory tasting notes, more specifically, I don't agree that that is the best way to understand wine or communicate about wine.
So when asked what is a good tasting note, I would say it isn't a tasting note at all. It isn't about taste, unless we can agree, and this will take a lot more than an agreement between Margot and Meg, we can agree to start talking about and bringing in more diversification and personalization.
Margot, you have had gustatory experiences that are completely inaccessible to me. You've tasted things and loved things and hated things. Maybe you've been around the world. Maybe you've stayed within a particular geographic area. Maybe you cook, maybe you don't. You have a body chemistry, you have a mental orientation toward food that's going to create a response to any food that you eat, anything you drink. I have the same. Everyone brings their personal chemistry, metaphorical and physical to the glass. And we also bring our own language. If I even want to talk about flavor, I'm not necessarily going to use the language of the WSET. And that is not just to be expected, that is good.
There's a wine maker named Tinashe Nyamudoka. He's South African. He's actually from Zimbabwe. He lives now in South Africa. He has a wine label. He recounts how when he was studying for the WSET, he would be blind tasting and he'd be presented with a glass of red wine. He'd smell a particular smell that to him was reminiscent of something called the water berry, the hute which grows in Zimbabwe. He knew if it smelled like hute, then it must be Pinot Noir, and so if it was Pinot Noir, he had to write blackberry on the test because that was what the WSET required to pass the test. That's like the essence of colonialism, first of all, that we are requiring people to do double work.
I think we need to valorize our own taste experiences and then explain them to others. Oh, this reminds me of this little berry that I used to eat when I was a kid, and it was really kind of tart. Maybe you use basic primary flavors. Then I understand something more about your background, about your taste history, about your grandmother. I've heard a great story about picking berries and we're not really talking about the wine in the glass because the truth is it's a hundred percent subjective. There is no right and wrong answer. That's what modern critique of wine language is saying—that it's incredibly exclusionary because we expect there's a right and wrong answer.
Margot: Yeah, I definitely understand that. From the standpoint of a consumer who is not a passionate person about wine, who wants to get a bottle of wine for dinner and needs an understanding of what is in that bottle so they don't waste their $20 or whatever it is, that is where it gets complicated, right? With online retailers, there is space for that. There is space to go into the subjective and to give some reference, but not say oh this is a medium body, medium acid, blackberry whatever. It's the responsibility of those online retailers to go in deeper, because as a person who has seen the tech sheets, right? You so often just see the tech sheet copy on the online retailer website—on 30 different pages. It's the same exact copy from the tech sheet.
But when you are walking into a wine shop and you have five minutes and you want to grab something, I tell consumers, just go and talk to the person working at the shop, say what you're cooking, why you want it. But for those big, Total Wines and Whole Foods and things like that, how do we change that narrative and help get those to a better place?
Meg: Yeah. Apart from the disclaimer that I don't want to sell wine, I completely agree that this is a big problem. And there's a couple things. Yes, if you can talk to somebody, great. Maybe that person could be equipped with some other ways to talk about what this wine is like. If it's a smaller shop, or if it's a shop with a reasonable scope or a really professional staff, they should have tasted it. But maybe they can say, well, if this wine were a car, I think it'd be a Jeep. This wine over here, it's sort of more like a Maserati. You basically use some other kinds of analogies. So you're not saying, well, this one's more cranberry and this one's more blueberry.
Margot: But how is that helpful to a consumer, a Jeep or a Maserati?
Meg: Taste literacy is really difficult. Color literacy, like visual literacy, we have really high visual literacy in our culture, right? If I say fire engine red or brick red. We can instantly, have a sense of what that means. If I say cherry and strawberry to most people, they have a really hard time conjuring the difference between cherry and strawberry in their imagination. So this long list of descriptors doesn't do us any good in conveying what this is. The fact that we're rattling off a long list of descriptors, which when I pour for consumers, they look at me cross eyed, and they're like, yeah, I think I can maybe get one of those? It's more about the power of suggestion, versus yes you're definitely going to taste the same exact chemical elements that you taste in a strawberry when you drink this wine.
So there's just a fallacy around the hyperspecificity of these olfactory descriptors. You’re talking about shelf talkers, shelf talkers really do sell wine, right? The shelf talker, maybe it's James Suckling and it's 93 points and it's one sentence with a few descriptors. It's a critic. There's a score. Sometimes a score is all you see. A score can sell a bottle of wine without any description at all. You put a 93 on that necker with James Suckling, you don't need to know what it tastes like. You're gonna buy it, right? It’s sitting next to one that says 90, you're gonna buy the 93. Do you know what it tastes like? No. This idea that we need to use olfactory descriptors to sell wine is a fallacy.
Price sells wine too. We know that this one's $18, that one's $25, I'm buying the $18. Now the bigger question you're getting at though, is how does the consumer know that they're going to enjoy the wine? That's a very challenging question to answer because the consumer is still going to have an awfully hard time because of the enormous diversity of SKUs available. You walk into Beverage World or whatever and there's shelves and shelves and shelves.
Somebody has decided to put these on the shelf. Theoretically it's a curated set of material, but the consumer does need to know a little bit about wine in order to make a reasoned purchase, and one does have to educate one's own palate to a degree. You have to just start, right? You know, maybe this person gravitates to California and then there's a wall of California reds. At that point, they're probably going to buy by price or maybe they've learned a particular variety that they like. I do think it's going to take quite a lot of iteration for someone to zero in on what they know that they're going to like.
Margot: I really appreciate this take because I feel like when I talk to folks in the industry about this, it’s always how do we make it easier for the consumer? It is very often that we think about, okay what is it that we can do? Let's make it easier, easier, easier. Actually, we're not a hundred percent of the issue here. The consumer has to learn about what it is they like. We can't spoonfeed it to them. Especially with something that is so incredibly subjective.
Meg: Yeah, go to free tastings! Small wine shops have free tastings every weekend, most of them. Talk to the people who are pouring. Talk to the proprietors. The most difficult is when you're in the Beverage Marts of the world. I think your observation, Margot, about online retailers having responsibility to do a little bit more work and to show people who like this also like that. Recommendation engines are at least making an effort, showcasing other regions. I've learned I like Loire red wine. Great. Well, here's this Cabernet Franc from the Finger Lakes.
I distinctly remember standing in the aisles of a wine shop in our local co-op completely flummoxed. I had no clue. I didn't know what the terms on the label meant. But through persistence, and because I had had enough pleasurable experiences with wine, I kept at it. Maybe some of this is key, this conversation has prompted me to wonder, is that we need to ensure that consumers are having pleasurable experiences in order to continue to experiment. Because 20 bucks is, for fine wine, it's the entry now.
It is an experience economy now, and we know that tasting rooms in wine country are by far and away where wine clubs get joined, where cases fly out the door. It's because you were there with your beloved, and there was a really cute dog, and you got to taste the grapes just after they ripened, and wow, they were really tart. You've had an experience, and now you have an emotional connection to that place, and that wine, and maybe to the whole region, and ultimately to sparkling white wines, or whatever it was, right? That begets affinity. You don't have to go to wine country to have those experiences. You can decide with a group of friends, you're all going to bring a $20 bottle of wine, you're going to open them all together and put them in brown bags and see which one goes first and then try to figure out why.
Margot: I love that. You've done a lot of work around the evolution of wine communications and I'm curious outside of tasting notes, since you started Terroir Review, how have you seen wine writing change?
Meg: I'm really guilty as charged because when I first started writing about wine, I thought the way to write about wine is to write good olefactory tasting notes. That was kind of early-ish days of wine blogging in 2008. It wasn't Alder Yarrow or Dr. Vino, but I was fairly early on. I started the blog to document what I was tasting. I think that’s what prompted a lot of people at the time to start self publishing about wine. By that time, wine forums like Wine Berserkers was already going. There started to become a sort of citizenry commentary. Vivino launched and then Delectable, people started Instagramming their wine notes and it became a really interesting evolution.
I'm still working on that part of my research. But that thousand flowers blooming of public sentiment about wine woke up a lot of American wineries who realized people have the mic and they're talking about wine in new ways. It became much more vernacular. It wasn't a formal tasting lexicon. It was like, this wine is “baller”, and then you start having celebrities swinging bottles around and talking about it in their own terms. Pretty soon it became very democratized.
In the last dozen years or so, the mainstream publications have had to winnow their ranks, their editorial ranks, they can't pay as much. It’s impossible to make any money writing about wine, and it doesn't even pay back your expenses. I think it's part of this inflection point we're at that publications have fewer and fewer resources. There are only three full time newspaper wine journalists that I know of in the U. S. There's two for the Chronicle and one for the Times. Food and Wine—Ray Isle does an amazing job there, but that's a print publication and their wine journalism has greatly shrunk in the last 20 years. So there aren't any real good options for bylines for people like you who are incredibly passionate, incredibly knowledgeable, have lots to say and share. So we take to Substack.
We take to Instagram. Some people are writing articles on LinkedIn. We're doing podcasts. We're vlogging. You're trying to piece together something like an income from it, but still at the same time, you're working full time because you have to, because otherwise how does this roof stay over your head?
Margot: Yes, can we make a living at it anymore? What does the future of wine writing look like?
Meg: I think that's a really great question, and I don't have an answer. I don't know very many people who make significant income from wine writing. I know many people who have fled it because it is so poorly compensated. I basically think of it as a charitable act. The people who are making the most money writing about wine, they do sponsored content marketing packages. They're doing winery website copywriting. They're doing content strategy.
Margot: Where's the heart in that?
Meg: Yeah, and it’s not very sexy either. It's nice to have a byline story in a nice publication. It’s exciting, and it's professionally really advantageous to work with an editor. When you think about the James Beard Awards, for example—those cost money. It costs money to submit your material to these awards. It's generally your publication and your editor that is going to submit the work. There are rare instances when someone who's a self publisher will win some kind of award, but it is mostly the writers who have had the benefit of polishing their work in concert with an editorial team refining the pitch.
The writer gets that great professional learning. That's how we're going to develop a community of powerful professional communicators about wine—by doing it as a community, not by Margot laboring alone in their office. You do great work, but if you were working with an editorial team who were collaborating to make the work stronger, each of you working to make the other person's work stronger, it would be much more powerful. And there's no money for that now. There's just no money for editors. Editors are stretched really thin too. They don't like it that they can only pay you 200 bucks for the story, but they have no option. So I don't know. I don't think it's possible honestly.
Margot: Can you talk about any work that you have coming out in the future that you're excited about? What are you working on now?
Meg: There are two things I’m working on that I’m really excited about. In addition to writing, I also am an artist and an illustrator. I have done a series of visual narratives about wine regions and topics that I'm really passionate about, and published those on my site, and I've done some illustration for other publications as well, and I'd love to do more of that.
Margot: I love your patterns!
Meg: Oh, thanks—I just just recently got into surface pattern design and I’m hooked on it. It's just so fun. I’ve taken on a sub research piece of this larger research project I'm doing about the history of wine discourse, and where we're headed, about visual communicators, people who are focusing on either infographics or maps and other kinds of visuals to teach about wine. I have great examples of these people who are mostly newer wine communicators. They're all doing profoundly great work and I'm excited to showcase them and to showcase their thinking. That article is in the works and I may end up pitching it, even though I know I'm not going to make any money off it, but otherwise I'll just going to put it on my own site.
The other piece is this really long research project that I've been working on for about six months about the history of wine communications in English, where we're at, how we got here and where we're going. I have done presentations about that, but I haven't put it into a full paper yet. This is actually sort of an academic paper. It's about 10,000 words right now and it may end up actually getting longer. So I'm not sure exactly where that will find a home. I'll probably chop it into some segments and shorter pieces. It might end up being a book.
Margot: That would be great as a book! We need more good wine books. There's space for more wine books. I'm an avid wine book collector. I have quite a few, some ranging back to the early 1900s in America, which is really interesting. There aren't many new ones coming out, and I’m always on the lookout. There's like natural wine for dummies stuff, which is fine and good. But personally, I would love to see more researched wine books out there.
Meg: Thanks for that. I think the work that I'm doing now, it’s not primary research. I'm not doing large language model reductions of wine databases or whatever. But I think would be readable and digestible. I wanted to get back to one point to a question you asked earlier about what makes effective wine writing. You talked about story, and I have long professed that it's important to have a topic, but topic isn't story. You have to find what the story is in the piece. Maybe it's about the maker. Maybe it's about the place.
The problem is that I think good wine writing, you have to have an idea, not just a story. A wine writer is a domain expert and they have to educate themselves enough about wine that they can understand what's going on with the wine, the place, the viticulture, the oenology, what's happening in the glass, and then formulate their own idea about it. It's a sensory product, but it also has these intellectual overtones. My advice to a younger or newer wine writer is to learn enough about wine to form your own opinions and then make sure that your opinion is in every piece, because your voice really matters.
People want to read about wine from a human being. I want to read what you think about that wine. I want to know what you felt and I'm looking to you for expertise, and so much of journalistic wine writing, like you can't even use I statements! I chafe at working with editors who uphold that particular house style. I feel it's very important that the wine writer put themselves into the narrative, because how else are we going to show the reader that we know what we know?
Margot: I love that approach, it’s so much more personal.
Meg: Yes, if I'm visiting a producer, I have to be there. I want to get the reader onto that hill in Beaujolais, right? Looking down at the flowers blooming below and the wind in your hair and whatever it is, right? You want to turn on the reader's sensorium. You have to show them how you know what you know. You have to use I statements. I don't know how to write well about wine without it.
You mentioned Terry [Theise’s] books in your earlier piece [about your favorite wine books]. Terry is the master of I statements and a great memoirist. He also does not shy from having opinions. He's an exemplar of what I'm talking about. I think the best wine writing does that.
Margot: I definitely agree, and it’s wonderful to hear that perspective. It gives a bit more freedom to a writer. Thank you so much for your time, Meg. I can’t wait to see your new projects come out!
Check out Meg’s recent projects and follow her on Instagram to stay posted on her upcoming work.
Margot, many thanks for the opportunity to converse about my work!