go buy grey magazine

I get no end of quizzical looks from people actually working in the wine industry here in France. Partly this is because, even after several years living in Paris, my French remains halting at best, full of stammers and weird grammar.* But it's also because the wine folk who interest me - the weirdo visionaries without business plans - are almost unanimously unable to fathom why anyone would write a wine blog. Anyone who wasn't, you know, making money from it. This is the unstated question that hovers over most of my cellar tours.

I want to make money too, obviously. I love money. I'm just going about chasing it in an extremely roundabout way, like a dog who initiates a correspondence chess match in order to attack the postman. The blog functions, when it functions, as a living résumé - a way to get more paid writing gigs.**

Now and then this actually occurs. With this in mind, I suggest everyone go purchase the new issue of GREY Magazine, a fashion-slash-literary magazine, where I have a humor piece on the subject of presidential drinking habits. Not wholly wine-related, but not unrelated, either. The concept was something the editor Brantly Martin and I came up with over a great deal of whiskey at the Hotel Amour last October. I had been reading a lot of Woody Allen at the time. A few quotes after the jump.

On President Obama's alcohol consumption:

In Washington it is no secret that the President, in full compliance with his constitutional powers as chief executive of the world's most heavily armed democracy, enjoys a cigarette and an alcoholic drink now and then, with cow-tipping, shrooms, and glue-huffing all basically tolerated as long as he keeps it to weekends and avoids Darrell Issa at congressional pool parties. 

On Mitt Romney's general election assets:

...For one thing, Romney as an entity appears fundamentally distant from human or voter concerns, like an alien vending machine. No one plausibly associates him with our flaws. For another thing, the man doesn't drink. Nor does he urinate. (The videos out there are fakes.)

It is that sort of piece. I also have a short profile of, and interview with, Loire vigneron Catherine Breton forthcoming in a new NYC-based magazine called Day Job.

Next, perhaps some mainstream publications. I am so ready to sell out these days. Anyone want me to endorse something Australian?

* At my real job, I recently phoned one of our employees to say that I'd bring her some super-glue to fix a doorknob that afternoon. After I hung up, my colleagues informed me that what I'd actually said was that I'd bring her some tights. Whatever, I said. She knew what I meant.

** For now I am mostly undeterred by the fact that there are perhaps eight people worldwide who survive solely off of wine writing, some of them just barely.