My Wine Blog Award Acceptance Speech

No, please, be seated…Really, that’s too much…Please, you’re too kind…Thank you, thank you…I’m overwhelmed, thank you so much…Oh, and barking!, that’s perfect, Poodles barking…I feel like Arsenio Hall…Black and overrated…Please, that’s enough…Everyone please be seated, like 1WineDoody, that’s the idea, Joe…Oh, you’re standing, sorry…Thank you, thank you, thank you…

We’ve changed the world, fellow bloggers. Before we came along people had to rely on professional, paid wine critics for wine recommendations and wine knowledge. Accurate and timely reviews that reflected decades of study and experience. Who needs that crap? Those establishment talking heads peddling the same tired old clichés and tasting notes, all recommending the same damn wines with damn near the same scores. What sort of hell was that we lived in? Old, fat, white guys telling us what wine to drink. It’s like we’d died and gone to the Bush White House. Thank God those days are behind us. We don’t need the corrupt mainstream media any longer. We’re wine bloggers. We have corrupt covered.

We have changed the world, fellow bloggers. Before we came along wineries had it easy. They submitted their wines to those old, fat, white guys—Parker and Laube and Jancis—and waited for scores. Winemakers knew what they liked, knew how to deliver that high-scoring combination of intensity, balance and elegance. And we fell for it. We believed that’s what great wine tasted like. Now we know better, thanks to bloggers. We know that, sure, it may be amazing wine, it might be the stuff of dreams, but is it natural? Without bloggers and their endearing high-pitched whine, we’d never have known that what really matters about wine is not how it tastes, but how it’s produced. This is how men think about their semen. But now we know, thanks to the hard work and insight of  dedicated bloggers, that it’s also how we should think about wine. We have wine bloggers to thank for that. And wineries have taken notice, delivering to bloggers wines with very little taste, but beautifully produced. And the bloggers have graced those wines with high praise indeed.

We have changed the world, fellow bloggers. Before we came along wine and wine knowledge were held in high regard, even reverence. One toiled long years to be recognized as an expert in wine. We’ve changed that. Now wine is seen for what it really is—pedestrian on the face of it. It’s basically just like beer, or energy drinks. Wine is thought of as it should be now, thanks to wine bloggers—crap you buy after taking a leak at the ARCO station. Where once wine was as much about its history and influence on the human race as it was about insobriety, now it’s about how it goes with caftans, rap music and your menstrual cycle. We did that. It’s a modern miracle, really. We live in the age of Devaluation. Dollars, houses, privacy, freedom… And bloggers have added wine to that all important list where it belongs.

We have changed the world, fellow bloggers. Now everyone is a wine critic, a virtual wine expert. And look how that has changed the wine world. Now once important critics have wine blogs! Look at them, they’re everywhere. Suckling, Heimoff, Olken, Gregutt, and a hundred others. Stuff they used to get paid for, they’re now giving away for free! They’re like hookers who finally escaped their pimps. It’s the great Yelpification of wine reviewing, and we achieved that. You don’t have to read a professional review of a wine any more, you can go to CellarTracker and see what a hundred yahoos thought of it, people you’d laugh at in so many other circumstances but who now take on the great import of anonymity. They must know more than I do, they’re on CellarTracker, for fuck’s sake! It’s so much better this way. Honestly, wouldn’t you rather take advice on buying Pinot Noir from someone who has never had their judgment tainted by having tasted all the great wines of Burgundy? Some arrogant creep like that? Why should wines be judged in context? That’s just elitism. If there’s one thing wine blogs have taught us, it’s that experience is vastly overrated. That you should join me on my journey to discover wine, even though I seem to have forgotten my tent, compass and matches.

I’m so proud of us, fellow bloggers. I accept this Wine Blog Award for all of us who toil at the keyboard for no pay and, more importantly, no audience. I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the other five nominees in my category.

Good night.