Why Start a Wine Site, of All Things, at This Crazy Moment?
And there are no financial backers: Please explain
Occasionally, Heated posts pieces on drinking when an angle speaks to us — usually having to do with the intersection of beer, wine, or spirits and social justice, or the environment, or cooking, or history. This week, one of our writers, Jason Wilson, launched his own site on Medium, Planet of the Grapes: a wine-focused deep-dive, for which he’s pulled in some top-notch writers. I reached out to him to talk more about why now.
Jason, you’ve been writing for us occasionally about spirits; you just came out with a book on cider; you’ve written about wine — including an anti-Robert Parker book about weird and obscure grapes. Why go back to the spirit of 2003 to start a site that’s all love (and no money)?
Wait, you mean there’s no money in wine media? The short answer is that I know a lot of wine writers — including my editing partners Paula Redes Sidore and Valerie Kathawala — who felt like a new platform for a different kind of wine writing is needed. When I saw that all of the big wine trade fairs around the world were being canceled because of the pandemic, I thought of all the conversations about the future of wine that were not going to happen this year. And so maybe that gave us a little more impetus to…
