Einstein was there before us. As he famously put it, I know not with what technologies the third 67 Pall Mall awards were fought, but the fourth will be fought with quills and inkwells. Perhaps entrants will be invited to nearby Westminster school and asked to produce their submissions in real time. Maybe Richard Hemming, founder of the awards and one who must now be feeling very keenly that no good deed goes unpunished, will be tasked with patrolling the hall, ruler in hand. (“Hands out of your pockets Pharos! Eyes on the front, sit up straight.”) Or they could go the other way, and embrace the machine completely. Take a leaf out of Formula 1’s book, with Constructor and Driver wins. (“Oooh, I fancy Meta’s chances this year, they got both Pharos and Atkin prompting for them.”). Brave New World and all that. Either way, drastic changes seem to be required.

If you are not quite sure what I’m talking about, it is the latest storm in a wine glass, concerning alleged use of AI for a winning entry in the short form writing part of the competition. I hesitate to send anyone to Substack, but this seems to be the only place where the issue has been publicly discussed. Unsurprisingly, many fellow contenders were very unimpressed. One answer the organisers reportedly gave is that they “have it in good faith that the work (…) is not 100% AI-generated”, which is an interesting line of defence. For the more traditionalist among us, this is rather like a kebab shop owner enthusiastically assuring you that the thing on the spit is not 100% horsemeat.

I empathise with the anguish of the professional writers. I also get the frustration associated with Large Language Models, the first technology to come out of the womb fully enshittified, completely skipping the stages in between.

But also, I kind of don’t?

More decorously, I am not so much interested in the controversy (I generically encourage you to read the winning entry to decide for yourself yadda yadda), but in the series of uncomfortable truths it highlights for wine writing, an activity whose definition has always been very fluid.

The highest horse to get on is that of journalism, because a wine journalist is about as close to a journalist as a wine judge is to a judge. The wine correspondents of major newspapers are not known for investigative journalism; the few wine-related stories that break into the mainstream are rarely uncovered, or even covered, by them. Having a few drinks with Xavier and reporting how he reckons the Pinot will do this year is hardly Boys of Baghdad stuff. The industry-focused press is about as exciting and hard-hitting as Warehouse and Logistics News. As for the erstwhile consumer-oriented glossy magazines…we are where we are.

What people mean when they say they are wine journalists is usually “I know how to write a piece to the structure, word count, phrasing, and legal requirements of a newspaper editor”. This is a real and fine professional skill – but, sadly, also one that reflected a specific time, industry, and format and whose demand is in steady decline, a bit like illustrators or guitar amp technicians.

For a long time, wine writer often implied wine critic. Now, I am decisively in the minority here, as I find wine criticism, with all its score and tasting note accoutrements, genuinely useful, if more as an opinion exchange mechanism than a buying guide. I also respect it because it pushes the author to take a stand. But I also maintain it is very difficult to do well, and the majority of it is done, if not very badly, at least in a very formulaic manner. There was a satirical piece by Ron Washam in these pages along those lines that now looks remarkably prescient. At some point, it is not really that relevant if the originator of the slop is organic or inorganic.

Which brings us to the last major branch of wine writing and the one whose loss is most lamented by the people it once employed. This is the garden variety travelogue of a wine-producing region,  like Dear Diary with a few wine labels thrown in to keep the people paying for it happy. I’ve had the misfortune of going over a few of those in times past and my thoughts were always “did anyone actually ever sit down and read this stuff?” There were no Google Analytics, so we cannot know. Maybe there were truly very few things to do on a Sunday in 1980s England. But it looks more like something publications felt obliged to have because it is the sort of thing one does. I dare you to read a couple, especially those whose authors feel they are poetic or intellectual, and then tell me if you don’t beg for the sweet, sweet release of ChatGPT. At least the Large Language Model doesn’t think it’s being profound when it’s writing this stuff. (Well, except Claude, but that’s only because it was given a French name.)

There has always been a duality in wine writing: it is writing, but it is not primarily about the writing. It has some exceptional writers, if only because writing convincingly and engagingly about wine on a regular basis is a very tricky thing to do. But the quality of the writing, or even the thinking, is rarely its primary aim. (I am talking about Anglophone wine writing here, a genre that has not produced many Veronellis.) It is not entirely incidental Pall Mall calls them communication awards. There is always a loose understanding that this is, at least partially, a marketing activity, if with different degrees of overtness and control. And as such, it is a very broad church.

But the wine glass can also be half-full. This pluralism of wine writing is also its strength. It allows for many voices and styles. It is remarkably porous to outsiders (including the occasional hanger-on like yours truly). And it encourages lively debate that touches on greater things. As for me, I like to keep au courant with the latest trends. My Higgsfield AI subscription is at the ready. Between that, and this piece here, I think I have the 2027 award for All-Round Wine Communicator in the bag.

Photo by Immo Wegmann on Unsplash