Read and Drink Wine For a Longer and Healthier Life
What's the future of wine writing when no one is reading?
How appropriate that on the day I launch The Spill, a daily newsletter featuring the best wine content from around the web, the New York Times informs me (it really did seem like they were writing just for me) that Americans aren’t reading for fun:
“Researchers from University College London and the University of Florida examined national data from 2003 to 2023 and found that the share of people who reported reading for pleasure on a given day fell to 16 percent in 2023 from a peak of 28 percent in 2004 — a drop of about 40 percent. It declined around 3 percent each year over those two decades.”
The decline in reading could have implications for Americans’ learning, relationships and overall well-being, the researchers said.
The findings showed significant demographic disparities among those who read for pleasure. For example, in 2023, the most highly educated people were more than twice as likely to read as the least educated, and high-income people were about 1.5 times as likely to read as low-income people. Those disparities widened over time.
One thing we know is that core wine drinkers, those who drink wine weekly, tend to be of higher incomes and more educated. So, I guess I’ve got that going for me.
Have you ever sat down and quietly read a book about wine while drinking a glass of wine? When you think about it, it’s a pretty unique experience. How many things can you read about while interacting with that thing? Food, sure. I suppose you could read a book about books or about reading while reading a book.
One of the things I look for when editing The Spill in the morning is the rare long-form article about wine. These things that go in-depth about wine or some aspect of the avocation used to be much more common than they are now. Most articles or posts about wine are relatively short. And it’s interesting to note that it’s far more difficult to write well in shorter formats than in long formats. This is not to say that wine writing has gotten better. Just shorter.
