When Dave McIntyre took over the Washington Post’s wine column in 2008, he thought wine in the United States—and wine criticism—was ready for some major and crucial changes.
“When I started, the idea was to make wine accessible to everyone, punch through the snobbery and that wine should be an everyday drink,” says McIntyre, whose 16-year run as the Post wine critic will end with a farewell column in early January. “I think you still see that, and especially with some younger writers who sort of say that, but the industry is definitely going in the opposite direction. Wine is re-inventing itself.”
A ringside seat
McIntyre’s tenure at the Post coincided with most of the landmark changes that have shaped wine over the past couple of decades. He was there to see the decline in consumption among younger consumers, the rise of the anti-alcohol movement, the effects of climate change, the changing role of wine criticism, and consolidation among producers and wholesalers in the United States.
Yet perhaps the most noteworthy has been the idea that wine has changed its reason for being.
“When you’re getting away from wine as an everyday drink back to a special occasion drink ... you’re getting back into the idea that you need special knowledge about wine, that you need to study it."
“You’re getting away from wine as an everyday drink back to a special occasion drink,” he says. “And when you put it back in that price range, as a special occasion drink, you’re getting back into the idea that you need special knowledge about wine, that you need to study it—that you need to know the difference between a Barbaresco and a Nebbiolo, or a Champagne and a Crémant de Bourgogne. So yes, people are drinking better, but emphasising that knowledge makes wine more of an exclusive thing.”
How it started
McIntyre was an established East Coast wine critic whose WineLine blog had been around since 1999 when the Post hired him in 2008 to replace Karen Page and Andrew Dornenberg, who wrote the column for a couple of years. He had already made a name for himself as an advocate for US regional wine, and especially from then burgeoning Virginia. Local wine has been a career-long passion; he was a co-founder of Drink Local Wine in 2008, “the first ‘locavaore’ wine movement,” he says.
The Post gig was much different than what McIntyre was used to. He recommended five wines a week, more than 250 a year, in the first 13 or 14 years he wrote the column. When it moved from weekly to twice a month about four or five years ago, he still had to sort through enough wine to recommend three in every column. And this didn’t take into account the various trend pieces he wrote.
All in all, it was a fair amount of sipping and spitting, though finding quality wine to recommend “wasn’t hard at all. I probably tasted 25 or so samples a week to find five to recommend, or three a week the last few years,” he says. His life after the Post will include a regular piece for SOMM Journal, and he will continue to focus on climate change and the need for lighter bottles and alternative packaging.
The changing role of the newspaper wine critic
During a recent Zoom chat, McIntyre talked about the many changes he has seen since 2008. One of those, of course, is the role of the newspaper wine critic. McIntyre says he can’t speak to what the Post will do after he leaves, but that there have been significant changes that take in more than US newspapers dropping wine criticism to save money. The local newspaper critic had been a mainstay of the US wine business for decades, and was a trusted and reliable source for which wine to buy.
“I do think the nature of newspaper publishing, the nature of the newspaper business, especially now that it is increasingly online digital and no longer market specific, has been a change that has made a great difference,” he says. “Newspapers aren’t really local anymore, since they’re digital. They’re global. When I started, search engine optimisation really didn’t quite enter into it. Now it’s a big part of it. So it’s a big part of the way the article is packaged, the way the headline is written, and increasingly the way the piece needs to be written. And when you frame your audience that way, you rule out an article about local wine because it’s not going to interest people who don’t live nearby. And much of the audience doesn’t live nearby.”
"When you frame your audience that way (with search engine optimisation), you rule out an article about local wine because it’s not going to interest people who don’t live nearby. And much of the audience doesn’t live nearby.”
A key part of this is availability; that is, can his readers easily buy the wine he recommends? This has long been the bane of existence for almost every wine writer in the US, where alcohol regulation works to limit local choice. Just because it’s for sale in one city or one state doesn’t mean it’s for sale in a nearby city or state.
“There are contradictory trends,” McIntyre says. “Here in the D.C. area, we still have a lot of small importers, mom and pops. I don’t know that there is that variety elsewhere. But on the other hand, you do have the consolidation of the distributors that kind of chokes the distribution chain a little bit no matter where you live. So I don’t know that availability has necessarily changed much. You still have to search it out, you have to be willing to go to two or three wine stores on a weekend, devote your Saturday to it, to find the wines that you love.”
Are younger consumers, who have shown less interest in wine, ready to do that? McIntrye isn’t sure. A variety of factors, including increased competition from RTDs, craft spirits, and the like, is confusing the issue.
“I think younger drinkers are still experimenting,” he says, “and maybe they’ll come around to wine eventually like my generation did, or maybe not, since there’s so much else around.”
The rise of anti-alcohol movements
“The idea that all alcohol consumption is bad or just the idea that, ‘Hey, moderation means not drinking every night,’ and that’s kind of where we are now,” McIntyre says. “But how successful is this movement? I don’t know. This is the pendulum that swings back and forth throughout American history. I think what’s different about it this time is that it’s global. You’ve got the World Health Organization and some European governments now saying don’t touch this stuff at all. And here I think we’re having maybe the post-pandemic backlash to sitting at home and saying, ‘Well, there’s nothing to do. Let’s drink.’ ”
Which brought the discussion to climate change. It will change wine, he says, and especially for the most famous and most desirable wines, whether from France, Spain, Italy, or California. The options to combat it are varied, whether using more hardy clones of the traditional varieties, or trying to work with different varieties.
This is the pendulum that swings back and forth throughout American history.
“In Bordeaux, the idea is that they can define themselves as a blend of the five traditional grape varieties,” McIntyre says, “or they can define themselves as a style. If they keep the blend, the style will change. If they want to keep the style, they’ve decided they need to change the blend. So they’re approaching it that way, looking for different grapes that will adapt but will still make Bordeaux.”
Hybrids, he says, will almost certainly have a role in this, and have slowly become more common in many parts of the US, “much more than they were 16 years ago—especially on the East Coast, when everything was all vinifera and, ‘Get away from hybrids!’ ”
Finally, have wine drinkers changed much over the past 16 years?
“Well those of us who have gotten older, we may be cutting back a little bit for health reasons,” he says with a laugh. “And maybe certainly cutting back purchases, since we already have enough. So the question is whether younger drinkers will come around.”
It’s a question, though, he won’t be answering at the Post.
