{"id":9486,"date":"2014-03-20T15:07:28","date_gmt":"2014-03-20T15:07:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wineanorak.com:\/wineblog\/?p=9486"},"modified":"2014-03-20T15:07:28","modified_gmt":"2014-03-20T15:07:28","slug":"henry-jeffreys-on-wine-book-publishing-guest-post","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.wineanorak.com:\/wineblog\/uncategorized\/henry-jeffreys-on-wine-book-publishing-guest-post","title":{"rendered":"Henry Jeffreys on wine book publishing (guest post)"},"content":{"rendered":"

I rarely permit guest posts, but here’s one from Henry Jeffreys<\/a>, because he asked nicely, and I like his writing. It’s about wine book publishing and how it has changed of late, largely from a UK perspective:<\/em><\/p>\n

I have a bit of thing about old wine books. I can\u2019t resist picking them up no matter how rubbish they might look. My latest acquisition from\u00a0 Oxfam is called Supernosh<\/i> by Anthony Worrall-Thompson and Malcolm Gluck. It features the authors on the front cover resplendent in brash 80s clothing (though it was published in 1993 \u2013 the 80s carried on well into the 90s in some parts of the wine trade) both looking a bit tipsy with looks on their faces as if to say: \u201cI can\u2019t believe we\u2019re being paid to write this shit\u201d. Inside there\u2019s some spiel about how the book was cooked up by their agents over a boozy lunch. Unbelievably it\u2019s published by the house of TS Eliot, Faber & Faber. Looking back now, the 80s and 90s were a golden age to be a wine writer. Newspapers were expanding their wine coverage, there were regular wine slots on television including lavish BBC series and wine publishing was booming. It was the age of Oz Clarke\u2019s New Classic wines \u2013 proper well-researched wine writing, written for a mainstream audience, and the Hugh Johnson and Jancis Robinson seemed to have a book out every year (plus ca change<\/i> one might say). Faber\u2019s wine list headed up by Julian Jeffs had off-beat personal books such as Patrick Matthews\u2019 the Wild Bunch<\/b><\/i> and Mitchell Beazley were in their pomp. Wine writing was the new food writing.<\/p>\n

It all seems a long time ago. Faber sold off their wine list to Mitchell Beazley in 2002.\u00a0 I spoke with a mole at Mitchell Beazley who wished to remain anonymous. He (or perhaps she) told me that when he started at Mitchell Beazley in the late 90s, he pretty much only worked on wine books.\u00a0 Now it was mainly food books. According to him, Mitchell Beazley published too many wine books including some that were too specialist \u2013 trying to sell a book devoted to Canadian wine in 2005 seems particularly optimistic. Having a full time specialist editor was expensive for the rare successes such as their New series including Andrew Jefford\u2019s the New France<\/i> (still one of my favourites). In some ways the decline in wine books just reflects the decline in publishing in general, the decline of bookshops, of newspapers, but this isn\u2019t the whole answer because food books currently buck this trend. The Mitchell Beazley wine list is now principally Hugh Johnson and Jancis Robinson with a few specialist books including, of course, Jamie Goode\u2019s Wine Science<\/i>. Their last attempt at building a new mainstream wine writer was Matt Skinner who they thought was going to be the Jamie Oliver of wine. He wasn\u2019t.<\/p>\n

Nowadays the idea of a Gluck\/ Worrall-Thompson type affair being cooked up over a long lunch belongs to another age. In fact the idea of having anything cooked up over a boozy lunch is unlikely as most publishing lunches these days are dry. When I was trying to shop my history of modern Britain told through wine around, my agent was adamant that we mustn\u2019t let anyone think it was a wine book. He positioned it as a sort of Giles Milton-esque narrative history thing with added alcohol. Even so, despite a lot of positive noises, no publisher picked it up.<\/p>\n

<\/a>I\u2019m now doing my book, Empire of Booze<\/i>, through Unbound, a crowd-sourcing publisher. The future of wine books is now outside the mainstream publishing. You can self-publish like Neal Martin did with Pomerol <\/i>or Benjamim Lewin with Wine Myths and Reality<\/i>, you can crowd source like I\u2019m trying to do with my book and Wink Lorch did with her book on the Jura, or you can do it with the help of Berry Bros like Jasper Morris did with his recent Burgundy book. Publishers are finding it increasingly hard to connect with readers, but wine writers know their readers and can find them. At least I hope they can.<\/p>\n

The one problem with this new world is that the big mainstream books, the sort that need lavish funding, will not be written (unless they\u2019re by Jancis Robinson and\/ or Hugh Johnson). There is no new Jancis, Oz or Hugh. I\u2019m dying to read books such as New New Classic Wines \u2013 perhaps looking at Eastern Europe, the Levant and South America, or the New New France, but these are the kind of projects that only a big publisher can bankroll.<\/p>\n

You can find out more about my book <\/b>Empire of Booze<\/b><\/i> here<\/a> and pledge money if you\u2019d like to read the finished article. <\/b><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I rarely permit guest posts, but here’s one from Henry Jeffreys, because he asked nicely, and I like his writing. It’s about wine book publishing and how it has changed…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[70],"class_list":["post-9486","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-books"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wineanorak.com:\/wineblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9486","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wineanorak.com:\/wineblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wineanorak.com:\/wineblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wineanorak.com:\/wineblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wineanorak.com:\/wineblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9486"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.wineanorak.com:\/wineblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9486\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9487,"href":"https:\/\/www.wineanorak.com:\/wineblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9486\/revisions\/9487"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wineanorak.com:\/wineblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9486"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wineanorak.com:\/wineblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9486"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wineanorak.com:\/wineblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9486"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}