A few years ago – which, if memory serves me, corresponds to "the Paleolithic era" when you're young – jaws dropped all around the oenophilic community when Jay McInerney was named wine columnist for House and Garden magazine.
McInerney has been considered something of a voice of a generation (read: mine), but I always thought he was unfairly freighted with mis-perceptions and even some guttersniping: a talented writer who writes about the social milieu can be misunderstood as having an attitude, and even if they do, it is the writing that should, and ultimately does, speak for itself.
It seems that many among the cigars-and-snifters crowd dismissed McInerney's wine writing as disdainfully as they would a box of Franzia, while many among the hipster-wine-bar set dismissed McInerney's wine writing as cloyingly as they would embrace the "irony" of that selfsame box of wine. But anyone so dismissing often so dismissed for no better reason than the fashion of scorning the 1980s, a critical posture that the decade itself certainly bears some responsibility for. I've actually read one reference to this best-selling – and, to my mind both as reader and writer, very talented – author as a "wine brat."
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