WineInk: Wine, words, and a writer

Occasionally, when someone discovers that I write the weekly wine column for The Aspen Times, they’ll ask, “How’d you get into wine?”

Fair question.  

But the bigger question may be, “How’d you get into writing?”

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Those of us who have the great good fortune to be published with some regularity have roots as storytellers and scribblers. And most of the initial seeds for those roots were planted by other writers.

After all, we were all readers before we were writers.

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As a kid, my first experience in reading great writing was supplied by sports writers of the 1960s. The iconic Los Angeles Times columnist Jim Murray wrote lyrically and hilariously about the exploits and failings of our beloved Bruins, Dodgers, Rams, Lakers, and the Trojans virtually every day. It was a must-read. George Plimpton penned books like “Paper Tiger,” where he would engage in a kind of participatory journalism such as trying out for quarterback of the NFL’s Detroit Lions.  Each Thursday, a copy of Sports Illustrated would arrive in my mailbox in Malibu, and I’d read stories by the likes of Frank Deford and Dan Jenkins that would take me out to the ballgame, put me in a boxing ring, or on the 18^th green in my imagination.

Later, it was writers like Tom Wolfe, Norman Mailer, Gay Talese, and others who were grouped under the “New Journalism” moniker who influenced both my worldview and fostered a desire to write stories. And of course, there was Dr. Hunter S. Thompson.

But when I began to take an interest in wine in the 1980s, the magazine of record was Wine Spectator, and the writer I gravitated toward was Harvey Steiman. Then-editor of the magazine that was to wine what Sports Illustrated was to games, he also wrote a regular column that told stories about people, places, and things in the world of wine that helped make the subject understandable and accessible and, frankly, irresistible. His columns told stories about winemakers you wanted to know and places you wanted to visit.

Envy was an emotion I remember feeling when I would read a Steiman column about a visit to the great wine regions of the world.

So, when he recently contacted me with comments on a WineInk I had written about the business of wine, I was smitten with the opportunity to make contact.

As it turns out, Steiman’s writing chops were cut in sports, as well.

“My first jobs in journalism were in sports writing,” he told me in a recent phone interview from his home in San Francisco. “I was with the Miami Herald’s sports department in the 1970s, and that’s also where I began to write about food and wine and music. “

Yes, music. If you are a regular reader of The Aspen Times, then you may know that one of the most influential figures in wine journalism in the 2000s has long had a side hustle as the summer, classical music correspondent for The Aspen Times. Steiman has been writing about the Aspen Music Festival (AMF) for 30 summers now, twice a week on Tuesdays and Saturdays.

“It’s a labor of love and it brings Carol (his wife) and I to Aspen every year,” he said. So much so that the couple annually spends six weeks each year here in the Rockies.

In the early 1990s, an Aspen Music Festival and School (AMFS) official saw online posts of music reviews that he had written.  They suggested that he contact Stewart Oksenhorn, the then-arts and entertainment editor of the Times who we lost tragically in 2017.

“I’ve never seen anyone enjoy music as much as Stewart did,” Steiman recalled.

The two formed a friendship and Steiman started to write stories about the AMFS festival in the Times.

“I’ve always considered myself a journalist first,” he said as we started to discuss his career and writing, “And the reason why you get into journalism is because you want to tell people about stuff they don’t know about, right? I tell people things about music and wine in a way that they can understand.

“There can be so much jargon in wine writing,” he continued. “In the ’70s and ’80s, if you wanted to read about wine, you had to understand the subject first because the writing was so technical.”

He tried to make the process more relatable.

“There was an early Napa wine writer named Bob Thompson who was critically important to me. Thompson said, ‘The most important thing about wine is how it makes you feel.'”

Steiman’s writing attempts to capture that experience of “feeling” whether the subject is a bottle of wine, a musical performance, or a baseball game.

“You can use analytics and jargon to explain why something feels one way, but you need other words, allusions, to help explain how it feels to experience, to consume a bottle of wine, or hear a piece of music. How does it make YOU feel? he said.”

He was a music major at UCLA and a die-hard sports fan who worked after college for the LA Times.

“Jim Murray was a God!” he said about the aforementioned sportswriter.

Following his stint at the Miami Herald, he became the food and wine editor of the San Francisco Examiner before matriculating to Wine Spectator, where he became managing editor in 1983 and later became editor-at-large. Though he retired from the Spectator in 2019, he remains on the masthead as Editor Emeritus.

In his endeavors as a journalist, Steiman was constantly in search of new stories worth telling.

“At one point at Wine Spectator, all of the staff would taste every wine,” he said. “But as we grew and the world of wine grew, we knew we had to divide it up. I had seniority as editor and could have chosen California or Italy, both of which I love. But I saw that exciting things were happening in Australia and New Zealand and up north in Oregon and Washington, so I chose those regions.”

In 1995, he took a courtside seat covering four of the most vibrant wine regions in the world.

He originally emailed me with a thought of a story explaining how “blending lots that don’t fit into high-priced single vineyard wines can make music as a chorus instead of a solo.” He provided a few wonderfully written pieces he had penned at Wine Spectator combining music and wine. I meant to get to those this week but wandered astray after our talk.

That’s a story for another day.