Wine Experts

For a decade, Wine X Magazine delivered wine news, reviews and gossip to the hipsters of Generation-X and other youngsters outside of the conventional wine-sipping crowd. As punishment for this flagrant attempt at welcoming a wider demographic of consumers into the exclusive world of wine, industry moguls killed Wine X . They starved the magazine to death, maliciously depriving it of the essential advertising support that almost all publications need to live. Strange, considering that Wine X, which was based in Santa Rosa, enjoyed a circulation of over 300,000, with more that two million readers. It even had a satellite publishing house Down Under. Clearly, the money-making potential was there. But according to Wine X publisher Darryl Roberts, established folks in the wine industry simply did not want to associate with his magazine. They felt that it cut too close to the edge of what is considered appropriate in the wine drinking community, which can be a bit fussy. In a recent conversation, Roberts told me of specific instances when tasting room managers and product advertisers actually called him to cancel their contracts due to the unconventional content of the magazine, which included gossipy articles, an adolescent, chattery tone of voice, and sexy fashion magazine-style photos of celebrities who vouch for wine. The first issue in June of 1997 grabbed barrels of attention with its racy cover shot of a woman’s navel (which I suppose related to wine in some way or another).

Most of us wine geeks have a seminal moment in our wine-drinking careers that we can pin down and say “That’s when I got hooked, that’s when I really caught the wine bug.” I bet most of us didn’t have silver spoons in our mouths, and this moment was probably not borne out of some pretentious snobbery involving a $1000 bottle of Bordeaux that had aromas of gunflint and wet saddle leather. I’m willing to bet that, for most American wine geeks anyway, these wine beginnings were much less formal. For my brother it was during his college years at Ithaca when he visited several local wineries in the Finger Lakes region of Upstate New York. For my friend Sean it was when he and his wife travelled to the Napa Valley on their honeymoon. Wine geeks love to tell their wine stories, and it is these stories, these personal connections and experiences that make wine so special to so many people. I thought an appropriate initial column would be to share with you the experiences that got me hooked on spoiled grape juice.