R.I.P. Wine Library TV
About five years ago I was bored or bummed out or something and I was doing a Google search for Sideways, something to uplift my spirits when I came across these YouTube videos of this young, short-haired, dark-headed, brash young man (30) delivering wine reviews from a stark desk with a New York Jets helmet dump bucket [sic] and a chalkboard on the wall behind him with cryptic aphorisms. I think the first show of his I saw was a Sideways-themed episode on Kris Curren's Sea Smoke wines. That's when I first "met" Gary Vaynerchuk. He opened his show strongly, like that government poster of Uncle Sam with the red-white-and-blue top hat on, head leaning forward, his finger brandished into the lens: "We want you!" Gary, instead, said, "Hi, everyone, welcome to Wine Library TV. I am your host, Gary Vay-ner-chuk. AND THIS MY FRIENDS IS THE THUNDER SHOW! Aka, the Internet's most passionate show on wine." I think I got it right from memory. I kind of had mixed feelings after that bombastic, in-your-face opening. Clearly, this Gary Vaynerchuk was a force of nature. But did he know anything about wine?
In that first Webisode, and in all the subsequent shows I've watched, Gary was witheringly critical. He dissed Curren's Sea Smoke 10 (clearly an overrated, overpriced Pinot cashing in on the fame of Sideways) and gave higher points, I believe, to the less expensive, less heralded, and better, Botella. After that, I started to take Gary seriously and his show became a kind of "guilty pleasure" of mine afternoon after afternoon. (I even found myself catching up on old shows when he didn't post that day.)
After 5 years and 1,000 shows, Gary retired Wine Library TV and started the Daily Grape, in an effort, I assumed, to keep doing the show, while also keeping up with his punishing travel schedule promoting his books which, ironically, are not about wine, but rather marketing, especially in social media. After only 89 episodes he folded the tent on Daily Grape. It had lost its energy, the production values weren't as good — and they were pretty bare bones on Wine Library TV — Gary had lost his energy, the shows were shorter, less inspired, it was time to let it go.
Gary V. (as I, and many of his fans, like to call him) was a lightning rod in the wine industry. Because of Sideways I've been afforded some privileged access to people and places that others, except those in the wine world, are afforded. When Gary's name came up, as if often did, it was almost universally met with disdain. I didn't understand it. I actually genuinely liked the guy and his show and I tried to take his side. Okay, it's true, Gary could be very self-aggrandizing, promoting himself and his brand with a zeal that some people thought was disingenuous and downright obnoxiously self-serving, but which I came to learn was intrinsic to his personality. I'll admit, Gary could be annoying when he would chop off august guests like the great Jancis Robinson or Heidi Barrett, as if they were the sideshow and he were the star. Well, folks, guess what? Gary was the show. And though you might have held him as an upstart in contempt — Robert Parker ring a bell, anyone? — you were shameless in politicking to be on his show.
I experienced a lot of the same jealousy that comes with success as Gary did, though in an entirely different way. Gary, it's true, inherited a liquor store from his family, and with the passion of a dyed-in-the-wool entrepreneur, turned it into a mega-million dollar business. He was one of the first people to realize the raw power of the Internet, the tsunamic force of social media, and apply it to the sale and promotion of wine. Now, everyone does. His 50-100 point scores were borrowed, of course, from Parker's much maligned rating system, but Gary didn't abuse them like Wine Spectator and someone truly contemptible in the wine business, James Suckling. Okay, Gary's "sniffy sniff" bordered, at times, on the ludicrous. But, frankly, I always found the "winespeak" of so-called wine professionals to be grandiloquent to a fault. I've loved the language, because I value words, and I love the way people reach for words — the only thing they have in their arsenal — to describe the aromatics of a wine, the front palate, the mid-palate, and the finish. Okay, Gary sometimes waxed pretty bombastic, but then so does Parker and many others. Why should he take so much heat? I'll tell you why:
Gary was charismatic, funny, youthful — yes, youthful! — and made you believe what he was saying about the wines he was assaying. And he delivered it in a way that wasn't pedantic or pretentious. He ventured far and wide — and though some might have criticized him for trying to out-iconoclast everybody else in a kind of deliberately ostentatious manner, I viewed it differently: Gary is a restless guy, he wanted you to see the world through wine, and he was going to be your tour guide. Love him or hate him, Gary made talking about wine seem fun, exciting. I once sat in on a Burgundy seminar chaired by the great Allan Meadows. What a crashing bore! Droning on and on about how many hours of sun a certain vineyard got in the Cote d'Or. Are you kidding me?! Fucking pour the wine, Burghound!
Okay, a disclaimer: I've had dinner with Gary and a few friends. He also was generous to write a very short, one-page mini-Foreword to the hardcover edition of Sideways (although it took a month to wrest it out of that busy guy). And, yes, I sent him a copy of my sequel, Vertical. But I've been known, like Gary, to speak my mind. I've taken my hits for it, from everyone in the wine world, and elsewhere. If I thought the guy was a joke, or was just using wine — as some people have accused — as a springboard to other ventures, I'd tell you. I personally think Gary is passionate about wine. I think he probably did use it, by his own admission, as a stepping off point for something greater because, again in his own words, he's an entrepreneur at heart, not a wine critic or wine writer. So, what's wrong with that?
In his six years of Web TV shows he cut a huge swath through the wine world. Like Sideways, he drew an increasingly younger and younger audience to wine appreciation, to the point where he had a following in the thousands. And where do you think the future of this industry is? In the livers of those over 50 who still read The Advocate as though it were some sacred scroll? Give me a break. Gary wore his heart on his sleeve, and that's something that I personally relate to because that's what I've tried to do in my writing. And it isn't easy. He may not have been your Average Joe, but he never talked down to anyone, he never lorded his knowledge over his audience — as use to happen to me all the time at wine tastings. He spoke fondly of his family, his passion for the NY Jets, could be wickedly funny, or sometimes just a kid with his predilection for mass market candies. Agree or disagree with his assessments, the guy knew his wines, he knew the players, he was fascinating, mesmerizing, to watch. He sported an uninhibited exuberance for the grape that flew in the face of the often stuffy, reserved, rarefied world of "professional" wine criticism. He demystified wine without dumbing it down like some others I won't name. He understood that wine was a complex subject, that it changed every year and was difficult to stay current on, but he didn't think it was beyond one's power to not at least attempt to grasp some of its complexity. Sometimes he did it by exhorting his loyal followers to try new wines, to explore new regions. He hectored them, he charmed them, he drew them in with his you're-going-to-like-me-no-matter-what outsized personality. He was unlike anyone the wine world had ever seen — except for maybe someone like Randall Graham, but the Internet made Gary larger than life, way more huge than any other wine luminary, which he had meteorically become.
Gary was right when he said that the three most important things to happen to the wine world in the past ten years were — he said it, I didn't — Sideways, Two Buck Upchuck (my moniker), and Wine Library TV. Without question. The wine industry has benefited hugely by those three seismic phenomenon. And what do they all have in common? Disdain from many people in the wine business. Until Sideways became a hit movie it was reviled by everyone. They even mounted a campaign to shut the film down two weeks before beginning principle photography because certain individuals thought it was a too transgressive look at the Santa Ynez Valley wine world. To which I shout: Hypocrites! Two Buck Upchuck deserves all the opprobrium heaped on it and more, even if it did rope in a lot of people who were drinking Zima and piss-water beer and transform them into wine drinkers.
And Gary V.? He put a recognizable physiognomy to wine. He single-handedly, in my humble opinion, hoisted wine into the 21st Century. He stomped down barriers of access and privilege like no one else before him and vehemently argued that anyone could develop a palate, you didn't have to have the wallet of an affluent man, bulk up a cellar and then pretentiously point out at wine tastings how you had a half case of '58 Chateau d'Yquem hoarded there, all the while looking down your aquiline nose and wearing your ascot to hide your turkey neck. I hate that snobbery, which is so endemic in the wine world. Gary, wittingly or unwittingly, worked indefatigably to shatter the ramparts of elitism which have kept the wine world so mired in the 20th Century. And he became famous, ridiculously so: he was on Oprah, Letterman, et. alii. And, so, naturally, when you get a little whiff of celebrity they're going to come after you, they're going to try to tear you down, deservingly or not. I've experienced it first hand. It's not a fun place to be sometimes: the sniping behind the back and all the rest. Gary, much of it unbeknownst to him, took more than his fair share, but like Bill Clinton and his Teflon persona, he moved on, fighting the good fight and not allowing himself to get pulled down into the ditch with his petty, pissant, Pinot-sniffing critics. Gary forged his own path, his own identity, made millions, it's true, but he entertained a lot of people, got them excited about wine, and now has moved on. He, like me, did everything that many in the wine world wished they could have done if, to quote John Gregory Dunne on screenwriting, they had the time, or the inclination, or the energy. Gary had it, and he had it in spades.
I don't give a shit what anyone else says in the wine world, where corruption and greed and hypocrisy are rampant, Gary's show and his magnetic personality will be sorely missed. The wine world may kick him in the seat of the pants as he goes out the door, but, like Kelly Slater in the surfing world, Tiger Woods in the golfing world, etc., there won't be another Gary V. for a long time to come.
