The Wine Knows

Wine X magazine, the eclectic, outrageous, confrontational wine magazine that started a year before Wine Press Northwest, has called it quits.

I first read about this on Paul Gregutt's Web site Sunday afternoon, then saw the email from Wine X Publisher Darryl Roberts this morning.

As with everything that came out of Wine X, Roberts' announcement was full of energy - and a fair bit of anger:

"There's a lot of talk within the wine industry about marketing to young adults," says Roberts. "New wines have been created, new wine divisions have been formed by large wine companies, all with the idea of targeting young adults. Yet they give us absolutely no support. Considering we’re the only wine-related magazine in the world that targets young adults, it's nothing more than a conscious-clearing PR stunt, if you ask me."

Wow. That's a lot of finger-pointing and, dare I say, whining. But I've heard it before. Back in '99 or so, a couple of competing newspapers started up that were going to cover Washington wine. Both were to be free, and they even had similar names. They both showed up at Taste Washington, each not knowing the other existed.

Neither exists today. And as I recall, one of the publishers was really bitter about his failure to catch on, blaming the industry for the lack of support, blah, blah, blah.

The first rule of publishing: Give them content. When we started Wine Press Northwest in '98, we were 44 pages, and the design wasn't all that great. But we focused on content, giving readers strong, relevant information. That has always been our goal. We didn't care that much about making big bucks because we knew that if we provided a quality publication, the advertising would follow. So far, that's worked really well for us.

Back to Wine X:

When the magazine started in 1997, I was fairly close to the targeted demographic of people in their 20s (I was 32). I read such magazines as Wired and enjoyed the novels of Douglas Coupland (Generation X, Shampoo Planet, Girlfriend in a Coma, etc.), spent a lot of time online and enjoyed wine as a consumer, interested collector and budding writer. Heck, I could have been the poster child for a Wine X reader. But the thing just didn't appeal to me. The writing was jaded and often hard to understand. I like a lot of music, but I didn't get the whole thing with pairing wine and music. Wine is an agricultural product; it goes with food. I'm far from being a prude, but I didn't care for the free use of f-bombs in the writing.

Frankly, I haven't read Wine X in years. Still read Wired and Coupland, though.

Wine X was tied in really tightly with Wine Brats, an organization of young wine enthusiasts. This was Wine X's target audience, yet Wine Brats is now gone, too.

In his email, Roberts claims a circulation of 330,000 and 2 million readers. If that's true, it would put him in Wine Spectator's stratosphere. Yet he claims he has no wine industry advertising support.

Here's a little secret: If you have 2 million readers, advertisers will flock to your door. If you have anything in the vaunted 18- to 34-year-old demographic, you're sitting on a goldmine.

Something else is going on behind the curtain, and if Roberts is blaming the wine industry for lack of support, he's probably pointing fingers in the wrong direction.

Read more:

Decanter

Good Grape Co. wine blog