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.
