Last week, as such occasions do to us as the years march on, an anniversary was reached. As of January 14th, 2024, I have officially been writing here on Vinography for two decades.

And boy have things changed.

When I started tapping away here in 2004 if you wanted to regularly read things about wine, you basically had three options: check out books from the library, catch a wine columnist’s work in your local paper, or read one of the three major magazines available about wine: Decanter, Wine Spectator, or Wine & Spirits. If you were digitally savvy and adventurous, you might know about a few websites like The Wine Pages, but by and large, that was all there was.

I began writing about wine here mostly as an experiment to see if I could figure out how blogs worked and what they were good for. After a few weeks, I found myself writing almost daily.

Vinography quickly became a creative outlet, a passion, and a serious avocation. In a right-place, right-time fashion, I shortly attracted a lot of attention for being a pioneer of American wine blogging, joined relatively soon by a small cadre of fellow amateur writers who built a great online community.

Those were the good old days of Wine Blogging Wednesdays. Monthly, someone would choose a wine tasting theme, and a deadline, and then everyone (all 20 of us, or so) would blog on that theme, with the host responsible for building a summary post listing everyone’s articles once they had been published.

Broader community engagement was great back then. From the thousands of people visiting my posts, I would regularly get 20, 30, or even 50 comments on my posts, and enjoyed some great back-and-forth with readers. We intrepid wine bloggers all read each other’s stuff, commented on each other’s pieces, and felt like we were pioneering a new genre of wine writing, which, in fact, we were.

The explosion of hobbyist wine writing between 2004 and 2010 was astounding. Thousands of people around the world began writing about wine, and the search results for wine-related topics were changed forever. In those years, any query about wine in Google was far more likely to turn up an article written by a wine blogger than it was any piece written by a “professional” wine writer, as most of their content, if it was online at all, was locked away behind paywalls.

As with any widely adopted creative pursuit, the quality and dedication of these online efforts varied considerably, but more than a few of us who began wine writing in those days have gone on to make something of a career of it, if not a (usually tenuous) living.

If online wine publishing was a rising star in the first 10 years, offline wine publishing was a dying comet. One by one, newspaper wine columns disappeared, as did most of the regular wine columns and coverage in more food-related magazines.

The democratization of digital publishing that made the wine blogging revolution possible represented a tectonic and irreversible shift in the media landscape. As eyeballs moved online, so did advertising spend, draining revenue from traditional print outlets. The low cost of publishing and the race for online attention drove the rise of clickbait, further cheapening the market value of the written word. Paid rates for the written word began a steady decline.

When I was the shiny new thing of wine writing in 2006 and 2007, I got offers to write for various publications at rates between $1 and $2 per word. These days, most offers I get are for $0.30 to $0.60 per word, and some are piece rates that would, if I bothered to calculate the rate, be laughably lower than that.

Things are a bit different in the online engagement world these days. I still have thousands of people showing up to read my stuff, but these days 99.99% of the comments I get are spam bots trying to game the world of SEO by stuffing links into comments. I’m lucky if I get one or two real people commenting on anything in a given month.

With the rise of Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram in the late 2000s most of the interaction shifted from the comment blocks of blogs to social media. The ad dollars shifted with them, and now it’s digital publishing that is hurting for revenues. I’ve seen at least three or four wine-heavy (or wine-exclusive) online publishing ventures start and fail (or fizzle) in the last decade. The sad reality is that for the most part, wine continues to be too niche an arena to generate enough traffic to make ad-driven online publishing very successful.

Pursuing my passion here for the last 20 years has been immensely gratifying. My luck in being an early mover in the space has afforded me some phenomenal opportunities. I’ve traveled to 17 different countries and scores of different wine regions. I’ve spoken at conferences, coached aspiring writers, judged competitions, contributed to research projects, and written a book.

Of course, I’ve also tasted some phenomenal wines along the way, from once-in-a-lifetime rarities that others have been generous enough to share, to obscure wines from unknown producers that most people have never heard of. I’ve eaten exceptional meals, and gotten to know amazing, inspiring people.

I’ve also had the pleasure of interacting with many of you, my readers, and had the great satisfaction of knowing that you enjoy and appreciate what I write. Because I’ve been lucky enough not to have to make a living from writing about wine (which is always a double-edged sword of time management with the day job) I’ve always been able to pursue this passion of mine in the way that I want, and my primary reward (other than my own enjoyment) has been knowing that my readers have enjoyed it too.

So as I sit here, 20 years on, I am immensely grateful for your readership, support, encouragement, and friendship as I chronicle my explorations of the wine world. I’m still having an awful lot of fun, which is why I’m still at it after two decades.

Thanks for indulging that little bit of reminiscence.

If you’d like to relive a bit of Vinography history, here are a smattering of favorite posts from the past 20 years.

The Philosophy of Wabi-Sabi and Wine (8/19/2010)

Why Community Tasting Note Sites Will Fail (6/15/2006)

Volcano’s Elixir: The wines of Somló, Hungary (6/26/2016)

1989 Fiorano (Boncompagni Ludovisi) Botte 48 Semillion, Roma, Italy (5/11/2006)

Your Taste in Wine is Your Own Personal Terroir (12/25/2015)

Why Slander a Grape? (4/22/2006)

Wine From the Caldera: The Incredible Viticulture of Santorini (7/4/2011)

Debating Robert Parker At His Invitation (127/2014)

1961 Hospices de Beaune Emile Chandesais “Cuvée Rousseau Deslandes,” Côte de Beaune, Burgundy (11/14/2006)

Ending the Aesthetic Fallacy of Heavy Bottles (3/26/2020)

Chateau Rayas and the 2012 Vintage of Chateauneuf-du-Pape (3/22/2014 )

Imagining a Better Future for the Soils of Champagne (4/27/2015)

Love is All You Need: The Magical Wines of Imre Kaló (7/7/2012)

Should We Care What Winemakers Say? (8/23/2013)

Food and Wine Pairing is Junk Science (4/2/2020)

Striving for Perfection and Finding Truth: Tasting 20 Years of Vérité (4/22/2021)

The Five Virtues of a Wine Lover (4/8/2020)

‘Clean Wine’ is a Commercial Scam (7/15/2020)

Wine Aerators: $336.9 Million Worth of Bullsh*t (3/26/2021)

Investing in Wine is for Fools and the Uber-Rich (12/7/2021)

Featured image: ‘Reverie of the Wine Writer’ made in collaboration with MidJourney AI.