Diary of a Wine Writer

March. So where the hell is spring then? Postponed until 2011 given the gang of cumuli nimbus that loiter above like bored teenagers.

This week I have avowed to plough through a backlog of articles on a cluster of German visits/tasting that I made with David Wainwright last September, concentrating on Willi Schaefer (pictured), Helment Dönnhoff and Klaus-Peter Keller in particular. I put myself in a German frame of mind and start transcribing interviews on my digital voice recorder. It is one of the greatest pleasures: starting with a blank page and finishing the day with a 4-5,000 word original article, editing the images and then editing and improving the prose, buffing it up until I am happy (although to be honest, I never am.)

Later in the day I pop into town to buy a book, Hilary Mantell’s Booker Prize winning “Wolf Hall”, to see whether it deserved to win over AS Byatt’s mesmerizing “The Children’s Book”. I pause to look at what Waterstones “New Releases” has to offer the literate citizens of Guildford?

Tess Daly’s riveting diary of her pregnancy, all soft focus shots and useless tips, a Lady Gaga unauthorized biography that appears to have taken 5 hours to write (including time to “research” on Wikipedia), 3 million glossy cookbooks of smiling TV chefs, a pyramid of Dan Brown’s “The Lost Symbol” that makes one yearn for a match and lighter fuel, “I Can Make You Thin” by hypnotist Paul McKenna (I stare at the book for 5 minutes but mid rift remains in situ), “JLS: Our Story So Far” which surprisingly runs to more than one page and…oh I give up. No wonder the print publishing is in crisis.

Who actually commissions this rubbish?

Who actually buys it?

Certainly not Willi Schaefer. He had a copy of Parker’s 7th Wine Buyers Guide open on the table when I visited last year…obviously a man with taste.