Blogging the Bloggers

Back in the day (circa 1980-something) I might have been called an average student.  If you looked at my report cards or saw my overall class standing, I could be labeled an underachiever.

Or if I’m not censoring my own writing, lets just brand me as a cheater.  Sadder still, it’s made all the more pathetic by the fact that I cheated *and* was still mediocre.  L-O-S-E-R.

My academic espionage was not even carefully thought out.  There was no coded test answers written in the palm of my hand that could only be deciphered by holding it against a small mirror I hid in my red Puma Clyde’s.  I did not break into the school the night before a big test and tape my cheat sheet to the bottom the desk.  No, I just sat close enough to another student (who coincidentally I may be seeing for the first time in 25 years come November) and simply watched as he held up the appropriate number of fingers to correspond to the multiple choice test answer.

Looking back on it now I realize my accomplice must have sometimes given me the wrong answer because he was one of the best students in our class and clearly I was not.  Shouldn’t we both have went Ivy League? I’ll have to ask him about that…

My point is, my initial concept of blogging was someone who takes another’s hard work, adds a few comments and suddenly they too, by proxy, are working hard and coming up with interesting content.  By this token I’ve failed yet again, preferring to start ideas from scratch to blog about, when someone else’s great talent was waiting for me to use it as my own.

So until Frank Rich starts writing about wine I figured I’d go to the next best source, Alder Yarrow, who writes the award winning wine blog Vinography and added a great piece last week regarding wine competitions.

The story was of particular interest to me on two levels.  One, in a former life I started and ran a screenplay competition at my old company, Final Draft and two as a small winery owner now, the chore of getting people to notice you, like Hollywood, is harder than ever.

Are there people out there looking to cheat the artist, be it winemaker or writer, like I cheated the Seaford School District from roughly 1979-1983?  You know there are.  And yet, there is something special in taking someone previously unknown and well, making them known.

There’s an old adage that during the gold rush days, the only people who actually made money were the one’s selling picks and shovels, and we used this phrase a lot at Final Draft.  But not in a condescending way.  Yes, we were selling the picks and shovels to Hollywood for those hoping for gold.  But you’re not going to take away the dreams of those who want it anyway.

This too I think holds true for wine.  There have been many adages about getting into the wine biz as well, most of them snarkily (if humorously) worded.  And I suspect that some who’ve written them held just a little bit of envy that they were not participating in such a passionate way to express themselves.  For no one can possibly get into wine with the thought of making money.

And thus, let the dreamers dream, for if a competition medal keeps someone who might otherwise quit making wine, stay in it with the hope that they can make it their life’s work, then who wants to quibble with that?