For One, Interest Was Sparked by a ‘Cosmic Moment’ : Writers Travel Many Roads to Status as Experts

Anthony Dias Blue was 11 years old when his father first took him into a wine cellar in France, and he can still remember everything about the experience--beginning with his anger at being in France in the first place.

“All I was interested in was what the Giants were doing,” Blue recalled in a recent interview. “I was upset about having to miss the entire summer, and he dragged me all through France.

“We went to Burgundy, and he dragged me down into these (wine) cellars and there was one particular visit, in Pommard, to a little vigneron (wine-grower) and the guy . . . had this broken glass, stained, dusty, and he . . . put a little bit of wine in this glass . . . (and) I tasted it. . . . It was a cosmic moment for me. . . . Extraordinary. . . . Fabulous. . . . Ever since then . . . I’ve been trying to duplicate that experience.”

Many Opportunities

Blue, now 46, has had many opportunities to make that effort. He is a syndicated wine columnist, the wine editor of Bon Appetit magazine and the author of a book on wine.

Other American wine writers took more traditional routes to their present jobs--often starting as wine buyers or sellers.

Robert Lawrence Balzer, wine columnist for the Los Angeles Times Magazine, began reading about wine in 1936, when his father asked him to become the wine buyer for the family’s carriage-trade grocery store. Two other prominent wine writers--Gerald Asher of Gourmet magazine and the San Francisco Chronicle and Craig Goldwyn, publisher of International Wine Review and a wine columnist for the Washington Post--became interested in wine when they took part-time jobs in wine shops while still in college.

Many other men and women who write about wine for major newspapers and magazines say their enthusiasm for wine grew out of their enthusiasm for food or for travel, generally in France or in the wine country of Northern California.

John Meredith, for example, traces his interest in wine to weekend visits he made to the Napa and Sonoma valleys when he lived in San Francisco in the mid-1970s. Now he writes a free-lance wine column for the Denver Post.

Take Many Routes

But there are almost as many routes to wine writing as there are wine writers.

Howard Goldberg’s wine epiphany came via his pocketbook (and his pride).

Goldberg was given a bottle of wine as a gift many years ago when he knew little about wine; he stuck the bottle in a closet and moved it from closet to closet as he moved from apartment to apartment. Then, one night in 1981, he served it to “exceptionally generous” friends at whose home he and his wife had enjoyed several fine dinners and wines over the years.

“There was much exclamation around the table, except that I didn’t like it (the wine) terribly much, and I wondered what the exclamation was all about,” he said recently. “I wondered why, if there was all this exclamation around, I wasn’t exclaiming.”

A few days later, Goldberg read a story that said a bottle of the same wine--a 1961 Chateau Haut Brion, one of the greatest French Bordeaux, from one of the greatest years--had been sold in a wine auction for several hundred dollars.

Paid Attention

“I broke out into a cold sweat . . . and I said to myself, this won’t happen a second time,” Goldberg said. “Everything ensued from that. I paid increasing attention to wine, ever more increasing attention, until, finally, instead of being Jonah, I became the whale. . . . I read a lot of books, read every (wine) journalist in sight, clipped . . . read and re-read them, got wines, tried them endlessly.”

Goldberg now writes the weekly wine column for the New York Times.