It was in 2006, when I was still living in New York, that I began blogging about wine.
I started out with a crude html-driven site. WordPress had just come online but I was lightyears from learning about the new platform that would rapidly become the standard for websites across the internets.
The mission of my site (I didn’t even call it a blog back then) was to catalog my tasting notes and chronicle special dinners and food experience. It’s funny to think about it now but at the time, it didn’t even occur to me that anyone would ever read my blog. Nor did I want to share my blog with anyone. I just wanted a virtual journal, a private diary where I could refer back to my notes and images. To give you an idea of how many lifetimes ago that was in the internet, the “cutting-edge” digital camera I had used floppy disks for storage. Yes, floppy disks. Late-generation floppy disks but floppy just the same.
I had been working as a food writer and copywriter specialized in wine for nearly 9 years at that point. And so it was only natural that I would expand the site to include my writing — sometimes tear sheets from published pieces, sometimes original content. And after only about 6 months, a friend of mine (a UniSG grad, as it so happens!), hipped me to WordPress. That really jumpstarted the process, especially because, at the time, WordPress was the earliest blogging platform to focus on design elements. It made it relatively easy to make an attractive site that expressed your personal aesthetic.
Then, about a year later, something extraordinary happened, Eric Asimov wrote a blog post about my blog. Wine blogging had just begun to take off. And Eric was blogging regularly about wine for the New York Times (sadly, his blog was retired some years ago).
Wow! My stats started exploding through the roof. All of a sudden, I had an audience. A big one at that. And with the expanded attention, I also began to become acquainted with the uglier side of blogging: trolls. The negative and sometimes outright hostile comments made me very self-conscious of what I was published. But I was determined to forge ahead (in part because I saw early on how wine blogging was going to become a new career path for me and it did).
One day I was mulling over whether or not to publish a post that had nothing to do with wine. And I turned for advice to a good friend, a writer and editor who still works in New York to this day.
“Should I write about music on my blog?” I asked her. “Is that going to make my blog less interesting?”
Her answer surprised me.
“First of all,” she said, “you need to remember that all blogs — no matter what the subject matter — are vanity blogs. No matter what you write about, you are writing about yourself.” She was echoing something that Gertrude Stein famous wrote about writing and the subjective nature of storytelling.
“But most importantly,” she told me, “you need to write what you feel.”
I’ve followed these two golden rules of wine blogging blogging ever since. And even though my readership has continued to grow, I still write the blog for me. That’s the key that my friend taught me that day. And when I think about the blogs that I follow and enjoy reading, I am convinced that these two adages — whether knowingly or unknowingly — guide the best bloggers to authenticity. And that’s the ticket, isn’t it?
+ Click here to learn more about the Master’s in Italian Wine Culture program at UNISG
Thanks for reading and blog on!
Jeremy Parzen
DoBianchi.com
