Any suggestions for a good wine magazine subscription? I had a subscription to Wine Spectator but it seems like they have less and less wine related and more general lifestyle content. I drink mostly California wine.
Most wacky wine-geeky often illuminating but also frequently irrelevant and irreverent magazine goes to Noble Rot. I love it.
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John Gilman’s “View from the cellar” is great but I don’t know that I’d call it a magazine. It is a very in-depth newsletter - no lifestyle content whatsoever. His palate is decidedly AFWE and while he assigns points, he does not do so profligately!
If you like California our resident Doug Wilder’s newsletter is great:
Not really a magazine but the graphics and write up are well done and it is more than just reviews.
Second the suggestion for Noble Rot.
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How is the Noble Rot book? Anyone read it? Realizing there’s a slim chance given its not available in the states yet
Inexplicably, The Robb Report shows up at my house (I never subscribed) and I’ve perused it a number of times. They have articles on fine wine in just about every issue, and the articles are of surprising depth and interest. I think those are written by free lancers, so its not like there is a universal c&p look/feel to them (unlike Elin McCoy’s Bloomberg wine writing).
Realize its not a wine magazine, but if the magazine shows up at your door, take a skim - the wine articles might surprise to the upside.
Available for Kindle in the US, fyi
Of the regular mags, I prefer Wines& Spirts. They have so good writers in their portfolio.
Tom
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+1
I get Decanter and like it, but I’m probably going to let it lapse and just do the online version in the future. I like physical magazines, but since they make so much more content available online and charge basically double to get both online content and print I will get more out of just the online “Premium”. Especially since it links with Cellar Tracker for reviews.
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I agree with Tom. Wine & Spirits has very in-depth and educational content. I’ve also gotten into many favorite California wineries from reading Wine & Spirits. I also love how their wine reviews include a lot of into about the producer and wine. My only complaint is that I wish they’d publish more often.
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I second Matt’s thoughts. I must also agree with Anthony’s comment about the virtues of online subscriptions, Decanter or otherwise. For the record, I subscribe to W&S’s print/online combo, which is not very different from the cost of the print subscription alone.
The only problem with Wine & Spirits vs other big-time wine publications is that W&S has a pretty weak online presence, IMO.
Allow me to clarify: subscribers can download/read past issues dating only back to the October 2011 edition; there is a limited (though improving) database of individual wine reviews; the selection of articles/editorials accessible on its website is incredibly tiny*.
If I log in to Wine Spectator, I can view a huge number of archived editions/articles/reviews, tasting reports, editorials, wine tasting notes dating back to the 1980’s, regional maps, etc. Even Wine Enthusiast offers a greater amount of internet-based content than W&S. I have not subscribed to Decanter’s website, but I am sure that it is thorough as well, in all likelihood.
Wine & Spirits is written with experienced aficionados in mind. However, the publisher is lagging behind its competitors on developing content for internet/mobile phone users. In 2020, that’s just not a good business idea.
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- I have ordered physical back-issues from the Wine & Spirits archives because the incredibly well-written stories from David Darlington, Rod Smith, Patrick Comiskey, Patricio Tapia and others, were still bouncing around in my memory 10 years after initial reading them. The only complications? I had to know the specific year/month edition I wanted and pay $20 for each copy!
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If you want to go deep down the rabbit hole, The World of Fine Wines is about the most geeky and in depth publication out there. It is sort of like Architectural Digest for wine lovers. You have to get past the ads for diahmonnnnds and Jag-u-rrrr-s, but the opinion and thought pieces there are first rate, pulling from a variety of authors, many who are Decanter writers. The reviews are interesting also, as they sample three different tasters on a single wine. The fun part is that they can diverge widely in opinions, and scores can be separated by as much as 5 points out of 100. (Kind of like drinking with a couple of wine buddies at an off line) So the reviews I actually find more entertaining, if not necessarily a great buying guide. They also do occasional retrospectives that are more in depth. So far the only downside is the price, a hefty chunk of change for a quarterly publication, and the difficulty searching out back topics and issues. They are all on line with subscription, but digging through them is a manual exercise, as there is no search function.
I feel the price is worth it, as I suspect that they pay the writers a bit better. The essays are not those kind of one-offs that you get in other publications, designed to grind out x number of words per piece in order to generate a check. They also thankfully avoid the kind of pieces like “Wines to pair with Thanksgiving turkey!” that make up a substantial hunk of commercial publications. (Honestly now, haven’t we beat that topic to death?)
The only downside, as I see it, is that William Kelley is not the youthful editor in chief.
Again, you are not going to find out how to replace that leaky faucet in WOFW. It is the Architectural Digest for winos…