Are We Good Enough at Wine Communication? In Conversation With Karen MacNeil
Author, speaker, consultant and all-round wine communicator Karen MacNeil has won every major wine communication award in the English language, including the James Beard award for Wine and Spirits Professional of the Year, and the Louis Roederer award for Best Consumer Wine Writing, among many others. TIME Magazine called her ‘America’s Missionary of the Vine’. She is the author of The Wine Bible, now in its third edition, which has sold more than one million copies.
Areni Global:
How would you define wine communication today? What’s wine communication for you?
Karen MacNeil:
I would say that wine communication is the ability to excite someone about wine enough that they want to run right out and buy a bottle of wine and open it. It’s a practical definition in a sense, because all the wine, all the words in the world, if they don’t inspire someone to actually want to have a great glass of wine, then what is the point?
Wine communication is the ability to excite someone about wine enough that they want to run right out and buy a bottle of wine and open it. It’s a practical definition in a sense, because all the wine, all the words in the world, if they don’t inspire someone to actually want to have a great glass of wine, then what is the point?
Karen MacNeil
Did that definition of wine communication evolve through your career? Did you have another way of understanding it before?
Not for me, but I have to say that when I started as a young journalist and when I was learning about wine, a lot of wine journalism was what I think of as “I had a great time, too bad you weren’t there’” It was show-off wine writing.
That doesn’t make people feel good. I’m always thinking when I’m writing: what would make someone sitting with me say, “Oh, I can’t wait to try that”? That’s a very different style of journalism than writing down everything to show off.
The format of wine communication changed a lot. Now it’s all those different forms of communication. There’s audio, there’s video, there’s blog. What’s the impact of that?
It is wonderful, but there were always different mediums even when people maybe didn’t use them. I started out doing a lot of radio and then a little bit of television and then advertising copywriting and then writing for magazines and then writing for books. I think when you are a good communicator, you are hoping for lots of different mediums because if you can master more than one medium, then you really are a communicator. You’re not limited by just one type of writing. People who, for example, wrote a 5,000-word magazine article on wine in the 1980s had nowhere to go if that was the only way they knew to communicate about wine. So to be a good communicator, you almost have to embrace all kinds of different forms of communication and the more you embrace, the better you’ll be at every single one of them, I believe.
So you don’t have to be a writer to be a good communicator.
I don’t think you have to be a good writer. I think you have to be capable of helping people feel something. We know for a fact that the great wines of the world elicit an emotional response in the drinker. And if you are a good communicator, I think you have to have the ability to help people feel something.
I don’t think you have to be a good writer. I think you have to be capable of helping people feel something.
Karen MacNeil
What’s the purpose of wine communication today?
Well, I am worried about this because I don’t think we’re doing a particularly good job at wine communication today. And I wonder if some of the downturn in wine sales today is the result now of two to three decades of not particularly good wine communication. I think a lot of people, myself included, are searching for ways in which to inspire people, but it is hard to communicate about wine and a lot of wine communication comes off, if not very show-offy, then elitist or just too precious. The purpose, to me, is to inspire and to have people feel that this is one of the great pleasures of the world that they can enjoy.
There’s an anthropologist whose name is Lionel Tiger, who wrote a book many years ago called The Pursuit of Pleasure. Lots of wine communication doesn’t immediately go to pleasure. It goes to “here’s how we made the wine, here’s what we did. Here are the types of tanks we fermented it in”. But his thesis in this book was that humans would not have evolved were pleasures out of reach. The two primal pleasures had to be something good to eat and something good to drink because otherwise early man would’ve thrown himself off the cliff, right? Life was just too hard.
And I think it would be interesting right now to take 50 pieces, blogs, articles, books, and just see if the word pleasure even appears in them.
In France you wouldn’t be allowed to have it by law. You’re not allowed to talk about pleasure or joy or anything that can provoke emotion. The only communication that you’re allowed is very informative and fact based.
So interesting. I mean here in the US you’re not allowed to make health claims. But then I would say we could certainly imply that moderate consumption does bring happiness to people. It brings people together. And in the United States right now, there’s an epidemic of loneliness. A reported 20% of American men say they don’t have a best friend. And when you think about those kinds of social issues and you think about even a half a glass of wine that you might enjoy with a friend, that is an important part. It’s historically been an important part of bringing people together.
What’s at stake for wine communication today?
By losing any effective wine communications, I think it’s not hard to see wine can begin to take on—almost that people can be alienated by it. That it begins to be seen as this completely negative influence on society. I’m worried about what I see in the US right now as the threat of another Prohibitionist movement. We see both Dry January and Sober October—17% of the calendar year. I did a video not so long ago, and the first line was, “I hate Dry January’” And the premise was not that I believe everybody should just be drinking massive amounts of wine. But what was so surprising to me in this video, I say I just don’t feel that wine’s story of its positive role in culture and history is ever told enough.
This got 11,000 quick responses on Instagram. The very first person said, “I think you’re wrong about this” —one of the sommeliers at the French Laundry, one of the most famous restaurants in the United States. And the sommelier went on to say that he was participating in Dry January. Subsequently, I learned that there are a whole group of sommeliers called Sober Somms in the US and I thought, boy, this is a trajectory that 10 years from now could really mean that wine is viewed in a very negative way, because the opposite of sober is drunk. And we know that the vast majority of wine drinkers are moderate wine drinkers. They don’t even drink wine necessarily every day. But to set up this oppositional idea that you’re either sober or you’re drunk is dangerous for wine. It allows none of that beautiful cultural middle.
There are a whole group of sommeliers called Sober Somms in the US. This is a trajectory that 10 years from now could really mean that wine is viewed in a very negative way, because the opposite of sober is drunk. To set up this oppositional idea that you’re either sober or you’re drunk is dangerous for wine. It allows none of that beautiful cultural middle.
Karen MacNeil
All my life I’ve heard what we want to do is to demystify wine and make wine simple. Wine is a very, very complex thing, but isn’t that the magic of wine? Should language be simple or precise?
When I hear people say, “I want to demystify wine”, I think, “Oh God, please no, no, don’t”. Because removed from mystery wine becomes ethanol, it becomes merely alcohol.
Maybe when people say, “I want to simplify wine”, maybe they’re talking about explaining a technique.
That has nothing to do with what’s sitting opposite that, which is to also be able to talk about wine in a way that underscores its mystery, its magic, its role in religious history. And that should not be simplified. That should be acknowledged by talking about wine’s capacity to incite emotion.
When I hear people say, “I want to demystify wine”, I think, “Oh God, please no, no, don’t”. Because removed from mystery wine becomes ethanol, it becomes merely alcohol.
Karen MacNeil
So you said that one of the purpose or definition of wine communication is something that should encourage people to go and open a bottle. It is also very easy then to confuse communication and marketing or sales. How do you distinguish between that?
I suppose good communication does wind up having a marketing and a sales impact and I don’t think that’s a bad thing.
If you are truly a communicator, to me it means you’re capable of lying awake at night trying to put wine into words that you can say or write because it isn’t easy to write or talk about wine. But I think a lot of marketers fall back on a few key phrases. Whereas I think wine communication implies a responsibility to agonize over it a little bit more to try and really find words that can move people. Words are powerful and if you can use them well, it’s stunningly powerful.
There’s no shame in being a good marketer and in telling the story of a winery or a wine in a way that is compelling and galvanizing and fascinating and interesting. That’s an important role in the entire wine world. But your obligation is to the winery, whereas a communicator’s obligation is to his or her audience.
You said to be a good communicator you have to master different formats. Do we need to talk very well to one particular audience or to reach and engage with different people?
I believe that the best wine communicators could talk to wildly different audiences of different nationalities, different genders, different age groups, different income levels. I mean, that’s the job. The job is to be thinking about that audience well enough that you can find the key in to them. And some of that, by the way, the capacity for the communicator themself to be vulnerable, to be not the show off expert, but to be humble and vulnerable and compassionate. To talk about wine in such an emotional way that the audience says, “I want in on that”. Right? Because not everybody understands chemistry or science, but everybody is an expert in how they feel.
We know that what we sense is going to be different to other people. How does should impact the way we communicate?
It’s a very sophisticated question because if we’re all in our own sensory worlds and those worlds are not overlapping, what’s the point of saying to someone, “This wine smells like old books and beautiful old Italian leather” if they’ve never smelled beautiful old Italian leather? But that’s all we have. That’s the thing. All you have with wine is metaphor and simile. We are all filtering whatever that wine is through our own brain and our own sense of perception. It doesn’t really matter to me if I write cherries and someone else is experiencing pomegranates. They can hear “cherries” and think, no, that’s not cherries for me. But if we didn’t do that, what else would we have? Wine would be reduced to nothing.
What’s the point of saying to someone, “This wine smells like old books and beautiful old Italian leather” if they’ve never smelled beautiful old Italian leather? But that’s all we have. That’s the thing. All you have with wine is metaphor and simile.
Karen MacNeil
Better to say, “For me, this wine is reminiscent of cherries” and let somebody else say, “For me, this reminds me of my mother’s rhubarb pie”. Because at least it’s an attempt of two people trying to take the complexity of their perception and their sensory worlds and verbalise it.
The goal is not that your perception should be exactly like mine, it’s that the two of us will have fun tasting this same wine, even coming to different conclusions about what it’s like and what it reminds us of.
One of the things that one realises early on is that we live in various metaphorical worlds that make sense to us. There are people who know a lot about music, who taste wine, and they’re listening. In a sense they’re hearing music. I was a private wine tutor for a while, and this man was a very famous architect. We were tasting a Bordeaux once, and I asked him what this wine tasted like to him, and he got this sort of faraway look in his eyes. He said, “This wine is the cathedral at Chartres”. I thought, “Oh my God, this man is seeing every wine he tastes”.
Like what you are reading? Subscribe to our newsletter to be the first to access continuous new content.
There’s lot of conversation about the words that we’re using and what they can mean for other cultures or people from another background. How does that translate to the job of a wine communicator?
We are all products of our own culture. As imperfect as it is, we have to create an environment in which everyone feels like they can jump in the pool. I’m going to say “blueberry”, and I’m hoping that that person from Shanghai is going to say, “it reminds me of…”
I cringe every time I say “wine industry”. Are there any other words that you don’t like?
Certainly words like industry and brand bring up associations with industrialisation of wine. And that can be seen as the opposite of artisanal fine wine. I don’t think so much about the wine industry unless I am thinking about sort of the broad, commercialised big brands with millions of cases. I find myself just using “the wine world”, because to me it is a sensory world and it’s also very idiosyncratic.
Every now and then a winery will hire someone from Procter & Gamble who will say, “Oh, it’s just another consumer product. It’s not that different from shampoo”. And I’ve seen those kinds of people come and go in the Napa Valley for years. After about two years, these people will be shaking their head saying, “I don’t know. I don’t get it”.
I think wines do have a life, and I think wines can seem alive. I think the best wines have a kind of vibrational energy to them that is different than just straight beverage wine. A $10 Chardonnay is unlikely to vibrate with energy.
Every now and then a winery will hire someone from Procter & Gamble who will say, “Oh, it’s just another consumer product. It’s not that different from shampoo”. And I’ve seen those kinds of people come and go in the Napa Valley for years. After about two years, these people will be shaking their head saying, “I don’t know. I don’t get it”.
Karen MacNeil
What are the responsibilities of wine communication?
I think the responsibility is to [make] a truthful attempt to capture a wine in words and then share it in a way that is respectful of the product, respectful of nature or respectful of your audience, respectful of the hard work that went into the making of that wine.
And fact checking as well?
It makes me crazy when I read something and I think this person wrote this in 20 minutes and nobody fact-checked it. It’s incumbent upon you to make sure that you’ve gotten as far as you can to the truth about something. And it can take you a long time. I mean, some of the best parts of the Wine Bible are things that took me two weeks of research to get.
What battles are worth using our voices for at the moment?
I kind of steered clear of anything that even smacked of politics in the world of wine. But lately I’ve changed that. I came out a few weeks ago saying that we would no longer write about heavy bottles. And it’s been an amazing result. It created a lot of consternation because here in Napa Valley there are a lot of big heavy bottles in Napa Valley. And I just thought to myself, you cannot talk about the importance of nature and how your wine tastes the way it does because of the beautiful terroir that your vineyard is on, and then do something that is so patently against nature, right? Because heavy bottles constitute as much as 40% of a winery’s carbon footprint. So I think there is a responsibility to say things like this.
I just thought to myself, you cannot talk about the importance of nature and how your wine tastes the way it does because of the beautiful terroir that your vineyard is on, and then do something that is so patently against nature, right?
Karen MacNeil
What role will communication play in the future?
It plays, and it will continue to play, an enormous role. One of the great beverages of human evolution, so good in so many ways, is being kind of left to the side lines. We’re going to lose something very precious if we don’t as communicators work harder to capture the beauty and the awe of its story.