What Not to Publish on Your Stupid Wine Blog in 2016

Here we go, a January tradition. This year, pay closer attention...

ABV DOESN’T MATTER, BOZO!

Ooooh, a new study shows that the alcohol percentage listed on bottles of wine is usually wrong, and more often than not is higher than listed! So the fuck what? You don’t need to chime in and act like this matters to you, or anyone else. “The label says it’s 14.6%, but when we analyzed the wine it was 14.9%!” Listen to me, No One Cares. We talked about this last year! We drink wine for the alcohol, so who cares if what it says on the label is wrong? Pedantic, uptight, anal-retentive jerkoffs, that’s who. Lazy ass “journalists” who can’t think of anything actually interesting to write about. Oh, maybe the label misleads me and I get pulled over by the Highway Patrol and the officer giving me the Breathalyzer doesn’t believe me when I say, “If I’d known the Chardonnay was actually 15.6% ABV instead of 14.9% like the label said, I wouldn’t have had that fourth glass.” Yeah, that could happen. And maybe the officer is a babe who asks you to drop your pants and offers to give you the alternative Fartalyzer test. I took one recently and blew a .12, and all the candles out on a birthday cake. The alcohol percentage on almost every goddam bottle of wine is wrong! There are actual reasons for that, but it isn’t important. Don’t worry about it. Don’t even look at it. Ignore it. People who pick up a bottle of wine and believe the alcohol percentage listed on the label is accurate are the same fools who think wine aerators work. Is that who you want reading your wine blog? Those morons? Don’t write about goddam alcohol percentages. You sound like an idiot, and you don’t know what you’re talking about.

YOU’RE JUST NOT INFLUENTIAL, GET OVER IT!

And when some utterly unread and worthless blog publishes a list of The 100 Most Influential Wine Bloggers and your creepy little compendium of masturbatory musings makes the list, have the common sense to ignore it. There are no Influential Wine Bloggers! It’s stupid to think there are. You get 20,000 hits per month and you’re influential? I guess that makes NFL wives influential, then. Or your crack pipe, if you believe that shit. A list like that is like a list of The 100 Most Powerful Homeless People. They’re homeless! How much power can they have? Bloggers are the wine business’ homeless people—always asking for handouts, free alcohol and warm places to sleep, then wondering why no one wants to make eye contact with them. Plus, they smell bad. And you’re #87 on the list! Congratu-fucking-lations! I’d be crowing about that, too, right after I finished bragging about how I got one number right in the PowerBall lottery. Just write your little blog, don’t bother us with how impressed some other loser is with your influence. It’s boring, and it’s unbecoming to someone with so much awesome power!

PARIS TASTING, ON THE SPURRIER OF THE MOMENT

Here’s another subject to avoid—2016 is the 40th anniversary of the Paris tasting. Great, you can do math! You weren’t there, you’ve never tasted any of the wines that were judged, everything you know about it comes from the movie “Bottle Shock…” Which means you don’t know shit from Sassicaia. Wow, a bunch of French wine experts were fooled! How often does that happen? Every week? Every time Michel Bettane publishes? No one wants to read your thoughts about how that tasting changed the course of history. Basically because you’ll just parrot the same crap that’s been said about the Paris tasting for the last fucking forty years! Did it change the course of California wine? I guess you could say that. I mean, groups of stupid people can change history, look at the OJ Simpson jury and the Hollywood Foreign Press. If it weren’t for the Paris tasting, would there be an Opus One? So, yeah, thanks a lot French judges. It doesn’t matter, just don’t publish anything about the Paris tasting on your wine blog—what the hell can you say about it that matters, or that hasn’t been said better by people with a lot more talent than you have? It was a blind tasting and the California wines did a little better. What does that prove? You know how every idiot says that he and his friends had a tasting of Cabernets and the cheapest wine won? So, like that. It was a bunch of French judges in 1976, a very bad jury of your pères. Let it pass.

96 TIERS MINUS 93 TIERS EQUALS SHUT THE HELL UP

And we get it, the three-tier system of wine distribution sucks. Wow, there you go, sticking your neck out with those outside-the-box opinions! Those giant distributors are squeezing out the little guys like so many butt pimples. Which makes it harder for all the smaller, boutique wineries to get representation and distribution. Which means it takes those wineries years to learn that there’s no demand for the mediocre crap they’re making when it used to take only months. That doesn’t seem fair. And it means that you may only have tens of thousands of wines to choose from instead of hundreds of thousands, which matters, even if you always buy the same eight wines most of the time. If you live in a state that doesn’t allow wine shipments—MOVE, asshole! Though if you’re in the state next to Utah, man, you’re going to wish there were more Syrians available.

I PREDICT YOUR PREDICTIONS ARE BORING

Do you really feel the need every year to predict wine trends? You’re suddenly wine’s Nostradamus? I predict you’re going to end up with a horse’s head in your bed if you keep it up, and I’m wine’s Cosa Nostradamus. Every fucking blog had the same four stupid predictions. Hey, I know, next year let’s predict the calendar. My prediction? This year, April is going to show up right around late March. You heard it here first. Idiots. You’re barely in the wine business. You write a wine blog, for hump’s sake. Believing your predictions for what’s going to happen in the wine business in the coming year is like believing Ted Cruz is going to be the President of Canada, which would be nice because who the hell cares about Canadians? So resist the urge to predict wine trends. You’re full of shit, you know it, we all know it, and you should just stick to what you do best. Plagiarism.