Jonathan Loesberg
Jonathan Loesberg
Dear Doghead,
Even here, reasoned empathy is no longer stylish. Refind your inner churl.
Even here, reasoned empathy is no longer stylish. Refind your inner churl.
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Shakedown
- Thread starter SFJoe
- Start date
Cory Cartwright
Cory Cartwright
I received a lot of wine unsolicited, and I still get several offers a week for samples of wine. When the old blog was at the height of its popularity I could have stocked the world's worst wine cellar with all the malbec you would never drink (everyone wanted to give me malbec). I was offered 2 wine fridges, one worth about a grand (I'm sure a lot of bloggers had no problem taking that one). I was flown to Italy (lesson learned), and could have gone a number of other places. If you go in whole hog it's a really shitty way to write about wine, and an even shittier way to read about it.
There is a journalist I sometimes drink with who won't take a single thing. He insists on paying for every little thing, even if you only offer him a taste. I doubt there is a single blogger out there who can claim the same thing.
There is a journalist I sometimes drink with who won't take a single thing. He insists on paying for every little thing, even if you only offer him a taste. I doubt there is a single blogger out there who can claim the same thing.
Scott Kraft
Scott Kraft
I've been taking bottles, trips, kickbacks, back talk, insults, side-deals, and free meals from an unnamed wine importer for years and that hasn't inspired me to write a single blog post on their behalf. I'm a worthless shill.
Keith Levenberg
Keith Levenberg
I'm actually getting the feeling that the free wine is just the means to the end here, and the Internet fame is what he's really after.
Jeff Grossman
Jeff Grossman
And so he chose Snooth?originally posted by Keith Levenberg:
I'm actually getting the feeling that the free wine is just the means to the end here, and the Internet fame is what he's really after.
lars makie
lars makie
Well, it seemed they might be getting somewhere (bigger) until that recent CellarTracker bust up.originally posted by Jeff Grossman:
And so he chose Snooth?originally posted by Keith Levenberg:
I'm actually getting the feeling that the free wine is just the means to the end here, and the Internet fame is what he's really after.
Mr. Doghead
Robert Callahan
It's hardly a shakedown to grovel for some of the crap others are given.
Why should mom not get some free diapers or Stanley Aronowitz not get some free industrial malbec if the hype machine is sending it out?
Of course, the trick, if Stan is serious about his new career as a wine critic or as a flipper of samples to neighborhood liquor stores, is to get the better grade of swag on offer. I don't know if the way to get the sort of Burgundy handouts Gilman and others live off of is to send a conspiratorial letter to major importers, but you never know.
To me, it seems crazy to see what some people get sent for free while others go forever without such favors. I am sure a certain level of shamelessness goes a long way toward producing such results, so maybe this guy isn't on the wrong general track.
I just thought it was worth remarking that in this era of geekdom, those smitten with the educational strain of the wine bug and those who feel compelled to master the domain face a really deplorable tuition bill on the way to fulfillment. People coming to it later in life from successful careers may have had their path lined with lucre and trust-funders always pick up interests from a standpoint of advantage, but most people starting out now or recently can't possibly get the kind of exposure I managed without finding a whole lot of cost defrayment along the way. Every shitty experience you don't need to pay for helps. And most of the experiences in wine are and were shitty. Learning this in detail can involve way more wasted money than anyone would want to spend.
And many good experiences get tossed aside with the bad if we do not take the time to learn in any detail. And this requires bottles. One cannot learn this stuff from herd tasting. Standup affairs and jeebii are good and valuable, but you don't often really learn about a wine at these things. You can get good buy or not buy impressions and sometimes even a fair general impression of a wine. But these tastings give very limited information, out of a normal use context, usually with only a minute or two with each item. And so on.
Don't undersell the value of samples of bad wine to the learning process.
Then again, I haven't seen many wine bloggers to whom it would make sense to give wine samples, on the measure either of donating toward an education or in terms of marketing to a community. But maybe I just haven't read enough Aronowitz. And I can't see going far out of my way to grovel, either, but I'm an odd character.
Why should mom not get some free diapers or Stanley Aronowitz not get some free industrial malbec if the hype machine is sending it out?
Of course, the trick, if Stan is serious about his new career as a wine critic or as a flipper of samples to neighborhood liquor stores, is to get the better grade of swag on offer. I don't know if the way to get the sort of Burgundy handouts Gilman and others live off of is to send a conspiratorial letter to major importers, but you never know.
To me, it seems crazy to see what some people get sent for free while others go forever without such favors. I am sure a certain level of shamelessness goes a long way toward producing such results, so maybe this guy isn't on the wrong general track.
I just thought it was worth remarking that in this era of geekdom, those smitten with the educational strain of the wine bug and those who feel compelled to master the domain face a really deplorable tuition bill on the way to fulfillment. People coming to it later in life from successful careers may have had their path lined with lucre and trust-funders always pick up interests from a standpoint of advantage, but most people starting out now or recently can't possibly get the kind of exposure I managed without finding a whole lot of cost defrayment along the way. Every shitty experience you don't need to pay for helps. And most of the experiences in wine are and were shitty. Learning this in detail can involve way more wasted money than anyone would want to spend.
And many good experiences get tossed aside with the bad if we do not take the time to learn in any detail. And this requires bottles. One cannot learn this stuff from herd tasting. Standup affairs and jeebii are good and valuable, but you don't often really learn about a wine at these things. You can get good buy or not buy impressions and sometimes even a fair general impression of a wine. But these tastings give very limited information, out of a normal use context, usually with only a minute or two with each item. And so on.
Don't undersell the value of samples of bad wine to the learning process.
Then again, I haven't seen many wine bloggers to whom it would make sense to give wine samples, on the measure either of donating toward an education or in terms of marketing to a community. But maybe I just haven't read enough Aronowitz. And I can't see going far out of my way to grovel, either, but I'm an odd character.
Steven Spielmann
Steven Spielmann
If you guys send me free Overnoy I will totally post here about how good it is.
Marc Hanes
Marc Hanes
As someone who has written for free about wine for about a dozen years I find this very funny. I buy 98.37% of the wine I write about. I have all the receipts going back at least a decade. Really.
What is funnier is when you buy a single bottle of a wine because you want to drink it and concurrently write a Tasting Note (TM) and then get accused of buying "samples." Hey, you have the money and I have the wine. God bless America.
And god bless Joe Dressner. Whomever he is.
What is funnier is when you buy a single bottle of a wine because you want to drink it and concurrently write a Tasting Note (TM) and then get accused of buying "samples." Hey, you have the money and I have the wine. God bless America.
And god bless Joe Dressner. Whomever he is.
Joe Dressner
Joe Dressner
I have been solicited by this Matt Aronowitz for years and have always dismissed his as a quack. I get dozens of solicitations like this a month and do not respond. I don't think these sort of guys are taken seriously by anyone in the trade.
There is a problem that from the outside it is very difficult to know who is "serious" and who is not. I have a promotional budget of $00.00 from about 80 producers, although most of them will send me some samples over the year with current shipments. 12 bottles doesn't really go far sampling our key customers, an occasional journalist and members of the FLDG.
I have no intention, nor the finances, to give out bottles of wine I pay for to people who should have access to trying our wines in an ideal world. Being a wine journalist is not a lucrative career and if you want to try a lot of wines you are going to have to come to the larger trade tastings we do for free. These cost us thousands of dollars and even if the participants wants to dismiss them as being "herd" tastings that are disagreeable to their tender sensitivities it is one way for us to introduce many wines for free. We even have good food at these events.
We will also happily give you the home addresses of vignerons so that you can personally visit them on your own nickel. You also free to buy a bunch of wines from a good retailer and organize your own jeebus.
Nothing beats the self-entitled America geek!
There is a problem that from the outside it is very difficult to know who is "serious" and who is not. I have a promotional budget of $00.00 from about 80 producers, although most of them will send me some samples over the year with current shipments. 12 bottles doesn't really go far sampling our key customers, an occasional journalist and members of the FLDG.
I have no intention, nor the finances, to give out bottles of wine I pay for to people who should have access to trying our wines in an ideal world. Being a wine journalist is not a lucrative career and if you want to try a lot of wines you are going to have to come to the larger trade tastings we do for free. These cost us thousands of dollars and even if the participants wants to dismiss them as being "herd" tastings that are disagreeable to their tender sensitivities it is one way for us to introduce many wines for free. We even have good food at these events.
We will also happily give you the home addresses of vignerons so that you can personally visit them on your own nickel. You also free to buy a bunch of wines from a good retailer and organize your own jeebus.
Nothing beats the self-entitled America geek!
Mr. Doghead
Robert Callahan
Herd tastings are good and valuable and irreplaceable for the trade and no replacement for drinking wine with a meal and following its evolution and watching the reactions of others to the wine. They do not replace following the development of the wine in the cellar. These things require bottles. Which cost money, each time, whether the wines are enjoyable or not. It becomes very quickly an expensive proposition for someone to develop and to maintain real expertise in this field, and people who attempt to do it need to determine for themselves the best compromises to make.
I don't suspect any of them expect the proprietors of cash-strapped wine-reseller organizations to foot the bill for their chosen endeavors, even if they're brazen and lazy enough to send out form letters to every and any group they imagine might have free goods to dole out to the nearest and the clearest little hopeful beak that might one day sing the praises of the goods and the doler. But clearly in a world where free cases of horrid wine show up to greet bloggers unsolicited, there are such goods available, and some budding evangelists just as clearly feel the need to stick their necks out just a little farther than those of their colleagues to get their share of this nourishment.
Which is interesting, but where's the harm in it, or the shakedown? Is it a sense of entitlement driving this? I see some strangeness in the example from sfjoe's worthwhile post, and a sad dynamic at work, especially given that the trade tastings Dressner recommends as the alternative to samples, whether bought or grovelled for, are cordoned events that may well exclude Stanleys Aronowitz and usually do, being that they're properly the domain of people making buying decisions and not of wine writers hoping to keep abreast of the field, but I don't see shakedowns, protection rackets, or, necessarily, someone or some example of a group of people unwilling to make sacrifices or to go to great expense to follow the wine advocation venture.
I just see a shameless shnook short on money and brains who wants some of what he thinks others get. And he's not wrong so much as he's not selective. And he's not likely to find some great chuck wagon unless he gets mistaken for Live Goats, Porquere, Flanken, or the like ... like Gilman does.
Am I missing something?
I don't suspect any of them expect the proprietors of cash-strapped wine-reseller organizations to foot the bill for their chosen endeavors, even if they're brazen and lazy enough to send out form letters to every and any group they imagine might have free goods to dole out to the nearest and the clearest little hopeful beak that might one day sing the praises of the goods and the doler. But clearly in a world where free cases of horrid wine show up to greet bloggers unsolicited, there are such goods available, and some budding evangelists just as clearly feel the need to stick their necks out just a little farther than those of their colleagues to get their share of this nourishment.
Which is interesting, but where's the harm in it, or the shakedown? Is it a sense of entitlement driving this? I see some strangeness in the example from sfjoe's worthwhile post, and a sad dynamic at work, especially given that the trade tastings Dressner recommends as the alternative to samples, whether bought or grovelled for, are cordoned events that may well exclude Stanleys Aronowitz and usually do, being that they're properly the domain of people making buying decisions and not of wine writers hoping to keep abreast of the field, but I don't see shakedowns, protection rackets, or, necessarily, someone or some example of a group of people unwilling to make sacrifices or to go to great expense to follow the wine advocation venture.
I just see a shameless shnook short on money and brains who wants some of what he thinks others get. And he's not wrong so much as he's not selective. And he's not likely to find some great chuck wagon unless he gets mistaken for Live Goats, Porquere, Flanken, or the like ... like Gilman does.
Am I missing something?
I don't run a blog, but a wine web site which is part of a much larger site owned by a newspaper. Even so, we have a very limited budget which only allows us to buy some of the wines we taste. (We have one weekly tasting by committee, always single blind.) So we buy those wines that interest us and whose producers won't send us samples free of charge. (The painful record: paying 495 euros for a bottle of L'Ermita.) We have no qualms about requesting samples. Our soccer critics don't pay for tickets at the Bernabéu or Nou Camp stadiums, our film and theater critics don't buy tickets either. We give the public (including the wine producers) a free service, and we don't treat any wine better than the next. We even pull a John Gilman once in a while - we rated 1998 Vega Sicilia Único 13/20...
Jeff Grossman
Jeff Grossman
With love, Victor... how do we know that?originally posted by VS:
We give the public (including the wine producers) a free service, and we don't treat any wine better than the next.
Oliver McCrum
Oliver McCrum
We just got the same email. I sent him a case of my best wine just to stay on his good side.
Oswaldo Costa
Oswaldo Costa
I'd rather have my blog right here everyday. Guaranteed audience.
You beat me to it, Asher.
Mark Lipton
You don't. Just as you don't know if the NYT's front page story is true or a fabrication. The only way to judge is by your track record - have your stories been proven wrong? Has anyone accused you of graft or corruption? The Times has been going for 160 years; we have been doing this for just 11 years. In the world of the internet, it's actually rather long...originally posted by Jeff Grossman:
With love, Victor... how do we know that?originally posted by VS:
We give the public (including the wine producers) a free service, and we don't treat any wine better than the next.
David Erickson
David Erickson
If I put a "Wine Whores" blogroll on my site, do you think I'd get more traffic?
It's so hard to find bloggers that stay bought.