Writers!

Recently, Robert Parker took some heat for comments he made at The Symposium for Professional Wine Writers at Meadowood Napa Valley. Somehow, I never got an invitation to attend. But the take on Parker’s comments was that they were divisive and dismissive; condescending to the attendees and lacking in the way of humility. The whole situation is a stark reminder to me of the reality that the leading writers and the real experts in any field are not always the same people. That truth became very evident to me when I became more and more familiar with some of the top fly fishing authors of our time. What rapidly became clear was that the most famous writers were the people who were really good at two things – writing, and promoting themselves. They often weren’t the best fly fishermen. Dropped onto any given stream, our silk-tongued sages would inevitably be students of the situation for long enough to reveal their fallibility. The best fisherman on any given stream is almost always a local guide who knows the hatches better than his relatives’ birthdays, can tie great patterns, and who knows each riffle and pool down to its smallest fish. Those guys can catch fish in their sleep, and they know the casting patterns and drifts of each stretch of stream cold. They may not be able to write worth a good goddamn, and even if they can pen prose like Shakespeare, they would much rather spend their expendable time fishing than writing. That is why, to my tastes, the best fishing writers have always been guys like John Gierach and Robert Traver; writers whose estimation of themselves has always been a solid notch or two below where it probably should be. They are writers who will talk reverently about their guides when they explore a new fishing hole, and who will celebrate their foibles when they reveal themselves. Mostly, though, they are writers who do a good job of capturing why they love to fish, and relate the tales that expose to the world the glory that is time with your feet in cold running water, a fly rod in your hand and no boss over your shoulder. Which brings me back to wine writers. All too often, the writers that get the most acclaim are cats who taste zillions of wines in machine gun fashion, out of the very context that makes wine drinking such a pleasure. They plow through dozens of wines with glass and pen alternately in hand, or worse yet, a keyboard in the place where a plate of great food should be. They may have decent palates, and they definitely have done the work to connect their tongue with their vocabulary, which is no mean feat. But they may not be the best wine drinkers. The people I want to learn from most are the ones who know how to prepare great meals and pair them with the right wines and the right people. Some of them are chefs, and some of them are winemakers, and some of them are HiLo operators at a Ford assembly plant who put in their eight hours and spend the rest of their time finding ways to live and love and cook and drink better. I still love to write. And I think some people may like to read what I have to say. So I am going to try to spend as much time as possible trying to pass along the few things I have learned about how to live better, and try as hard as I can to leave the pretense and the pomposity in the trash. Because I know damn well I’m not the best at anything I am trying to do, I’m sure not the best at anything I’m writing about, and the best may well be reading.