Why write about wine?

In a new article for World of Fine Wine, Terry Theise and I grapple with the question

Terry Theise and I met, so-called, nearly two years ago—“so-called” literally, as our friendship began and has been conducted by phone. I’d read his books and followed his work for years, but we’d never spoken until February 2024 when I got an email from him out of the blue. Subject: “We need to tawk.”

Apparently he’d seen glimmerings of my ideas about contemporary wine writing which resonated with his own long-held convictions. So talk we have, monthly, on hour-long calls in which we kvetch and catch up on what we’re writing, reading, and thinking about.

To say we share a sensibility about wine and wine writing vastly understates the degree of alignment. We both believe the tasting note is an impoverished way of talking about wine’s significance and impact. We believe the professional system of tasting and scoring wines, often under time pressure, elides the taster’s experience in ways that make the writing affectless. We believe that wine is worth writing about, but also that we owe the subject the courtesy of more of our human creativity.

We have come to these opinions and predilections by different paths, his through decades selecting wines for import from Germany, Austria, and Champagne, mine through not quite as long studying and traveling to understand what makes wine worthy of remark at all.

But Terry’s not merely a market savvy importer hell-bent on the discovery of deliciousness. He is also an exquisite writer, one with stylistic proclivities that are one-hundred-percent Terry Theise. Once, when I was visiting Müller-Catoir in the Pfalz with a press group, we all looked up from the tasting sheets our hosts had lain before us and smiled at each other knowingly: “Terry wrote these, didn’t he.”

Terry views wine expansively, holistically, and writes with clarity about wine’s personal and cultural signatures. He’s published two books; the first, Reading Between the Wines (2010), grappled with wine’s practical and emotional contours. The second, What Makes a Wine Worth Drinking (2018), delves even further into wine’s philosophical intimations. Now retired from the import business, he maintains a website and blog and contributes reports and articles to World of Fine Wine.

This summer, we decided to collaborate on a piece about wine writing and pitch it to that publication, which felt exciting and also the most natural thing in the world. We fired up Zoom and over two sessions let our conversation wander over the topography of contemporary wine discourse. We edited these conversations together so they read as a seamless unity.

The editor of World of Fine Wine, Neil Beckett, graciously accepted the piece and made it the cover story of the print edition of WFW 90, December 2025. Titled A Defense of Wine Writing, it has now also been put online without a paywall. I hope you enjoy reading it, and will return to drop a comment with your thoughts: Read it here.

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Screenshots from one of our two Zoom sessions, May 2025.