You Will Love the Wine, Or Else!

A Natural Wine Champion Comes for the Wall Street Journal

As a publicist, I can confirm that it’s very frustrating when a writer isn’t excited about my client’s wines. It feels like rejection, even if they are not my own wines. How can a journalist not see what I saw when I took them on as a client?

This has happened a number of times to me and the wineries or clients I represent. The writers and journalists just didn’t see it the way I pitched it. However, it never once occurred to me that the proper response was to call for the writer’s ouster from their employment as a writer or columnist.

Jason Wilson, an excellent drinks writer in his own right, sees it a different way in his excellent Substack Newsletter, Everyday Drinking:

“I would humbly suggest that the position of Columnist at Legacy Publication should not carry with it the same lifetime appointment as, say, a Supreme Court justice. I’m picking on Teague here, but there are any number of others in similar positions. As I said in my own farewell post to my spirits column in the Washington Post, a column’s perfect life span feels slightly longer than the career of an NFL running back. At a certain point, six or seven or eight years in, anyone simply runs out of new and interesting things to say.”

What spurred Wilson’s suggestion that the Wall Street Journal’s Lettie Teague ought to go from her post as wine writer at the Wall Street Journal? This:

“A Skeptic’s Tour of New York City’s Natural Wine Bars”

For those those of you without access to the Wall Street Journal, Teague, the longtime wine writer at the paper, decided to see what all the hubbub was about and do so by visiting a few of the city’s Natural Wine bars. Not to put too fine a point on it, but Teague comes away from tasting a variety of Natural Wines with a decided, “Meh!”