Jay Murrie... On Wine Writing

Writing was crowded out by food and wine in my intellectual life. For a number of years I thought some form of writing would basically be what I'd do. I graduated from UNC-Chapel Hill with a degree in Journalism. As food lust overtook all other passions in my waking life, I fell into writing descriptive prose to tell the stories of wine and food I'd tasted and the people who made them. Wine is delicious and that certainly is the hook, but as I began attempting to understand the vastness of it -- the inner mechanisms that lead to such subtle variance in fermented grapes -- I found the story of the people and the land essential to the enjoyment what I was drinking with dinner.

In 2000 I took a part-time job working at A Southern Season, which was at the time North Carolina's largest retailer of specialty wines and a pretty vast emporium of fancy foods as well. After a week or two I had ditched my boring desk job to stock shelves and taste the innumerable wines that passed through the wine office full-time. It was exhilarating: here were people analyzing wine for a living, doing so with a high level of professionalism and intellectual rigor. So my career path veered: this was an awesome way to make a paycheck. The wine folks at A Southern Season gave lowly sales consultants like me a lot of latitude, encouragement, and opportunities. I met everyone, tasted everything. I became the guy who spat out text for our newsletters, signs, the website. I was happy to do this: it became my soap box, a way to sell wines that I loved and desperately wanted to carry but knew wouldn't sell well unless their story was told. A lot of times they were complicated wines with compelling backstories, bottles that weren't going to jump off the shelf into customer's baskets.

In 2003 I became the sole buyer and manager for this massive wine emporium. In some ways this was bad for my writing. I became an administrator, attempting to oversee a multimillion dollar retail operation, make wise buying decisions to service a sales area with 3,000+ facings, travel to meet farmers, importers, and all manner of necessary go-betweens. I simply didn't have much time. I started doing my best writing on airplanes. Enforced isolation was necessary to bang out even a few pages. In an attempt to keep writing happening in a small way, I created a program of monthly emails describing (and hopefully selling) new wine that stuck with me. My text became the entirety of the store's monthly newsletter. My prose is not terse.

To fill up my non-wine free time in 2006, I took a position as Beverage Director for Lantern, a small restaurant in downtown Chapel Hill preparing traditional Asian dishes from a variety of cultures. This was formative. I paired essentially European wines with the flavors of a variety of distinct food cultures. Creating a list with appropriate selections for mackerel tartare and Korean braised short ribs (and many divergent points in-between) made me think more critically about flavor matching: this wasn't picking a wine for simple roasted chicken. I began writing extensive texts to use in monthly trainings with Lantern staff members, and these documents eventually migrated to the Lantern website in an attempt to explain to patrons the why behind our curious wine list. At Lantern I have the luxury of writing (and suggesting wines for) a more adventurous and knowledgeable subgroup of the wine-buying public. This part-time job feels nothing at all like work.

I spent the summer of 2008 researching and writing the backstory of every wine we intended to sell at 3CUPS, a new wine, coffee and tea store I was joining as part-owner and product buyer. It seemed like a simple thing. After all, we only planned to carry a few hundred wines, all estate-bottled, all naturally farmed. But research and writing sprawled out over several months. To be factually accurate and concurrently interesting is apparently not an easy (or quick) thing. Much of this toil now fills out our website (www.3cups.net); even more of it clutters up the store. This season was as close to the life of an 8-to-5 writer as I've had: 40 hours a week of chasing down ideas, trying to focus stories, relive interactions, coax back fiendish details intent on escaping seconds before I could type them out. I really should have taken typing class in high school more seriously.... Selling wine for a living makes it possible to meet hundreds of vine growers from basically every region that creates wine and to hear their compelling stories. I am a sap, unrepentant. A large part of me believes that good people make good wine. Being a wine merchant never allowed me to wallow too long in sentimentality. When I buy stacks of wine because I love the people and their stories, I immediately start a mental list of who's buying those cases. Back at the store, I share not only the wines that I love, but also the stories behind them. So I got swept away by the whole food and wine thing. No regrets.