This Week and Next: A Break from War - Home and Abroad
I was invited to speak about my series The Wine Wars and why it’s catching fire…
Note: this week’s Wine Wars installment is being pushed to Friday or Saturday — and it will be worth the wait. What’s coming involves documents that have not been seen publicly and are damning and just might be criminal. I am not going to get ahead of the story, but I will say this: the people will not be disappointed. In the meantime, I was invited to speak at a writer’s group this week about the series and why it keeps finding readers well beyond Chatham. I thought I’d convert my notes into a column.
I was asked whether I’m surprised that the Wine Wars has found readers well beyond the small towns of Chatham and Hudson, New York. The answer is no — and frankly, it shouldn’t surprise anyone paying attention to what’s happening to journalism right now.
Part of it is mechanics and part of it’s the story itself. I’ve been writing for a long time across multiple platforms, including being recruited and syndicated by NewsBreak, which has the useful quality of putting your work in front of people who weren’t already looking for you. Algorithms amplify. But here’s what algorithms cannot do: sustain interest in writing that doesn’t earn it. Platform statistics are mercilessly honest about this. When something lands, it lands everywhere at once. When it doesn’t, no amount of algorithmic nudging saves it.
For most of my professional writing life I operated without a voice in the truest sense — decades of policy, healthcare and academic writing that had to be, by professional necessity, essentially voiceless. Objective. Neutered. When I shed that obligation and allowed myself to write with actual opinion, readers appeared. This is not a coincidence. Authentic voice is the only thing a writer has that cannot be replicated, outsourced, or manufactured by AI.
The problem is that an authentic voice requires you to write about things that actually matter to you — which means you have to know what those things are. Most writers chasing the Epstein story or the latest eruption from Washington do not ask themselves this question. They ask instead: what’s performing? What’s trending? What will the algorithm reward today? The result is a media landscape that resembles nothing so much as a very expensive buffet at which everything tastes of nothing.
I was talking with a writer this week who described feeling flattened by the relentlessness of the Washington news cycle. I understand the feeling, but I also recognize it as a trap. There are only so many angles on any given scandal before the coverage begins to consume itself, and the outlets owned by corporate interests will chase those angles until the wheels fall off, leaving entire communities — their politics, their corruption, their beauty and their grievances — completely unexamined. This is what is called a media desert. I call it an opportunity.
I learned something about this early. My first job out of school was as a copy editor in Port Charlotte, Florida in the late eighties, working for a man named Jim who was already in full mourning for the newspaper business. USA Today had just gone to color print and the smaller papers were scrambling to compete, pulling resources from local politics, sports coverage, the social pages — the very things that made a local paper indispensable to the people who actually lived there. Jim was right, even if he was premature. What Gannett started, private equity finished. Local news is now effectively a heritage category, like handmade furniture or vinyl records — admired in the abstract, unsupported in practice. Look at what has happened to the Washington Post. Look at what happened to the Los Angeles Times. The infrastructure of accountability journalism is being systematically dismantled, and the people who suffer most are the residents of places like Chatham, New York, who need someone to show up at the town board meeting and ask the uncomfortable question. This is the American way.
Substack and Medium have arrived as the somewhat improbable answer to this problem. They are the artisanal cheese counter in the supermarket of media — a little precious, occasionally self-congratulatory, but genuinely filling a need. People want to trust what they read. They want it to be reported by someone who knows the territory, has skin in the game, and will still be there next month when the story develops. What these platforms offer writers like me is the ability to be that person. In some communities, I have something the big outlets categorically cannot have: sources who will actually talk to me.
The Wine Wars found me because I know this part of the world. I understand its particular codes — what is considered polite silence, what constitutes an unforgivable breach, where the bodies are buried both figuratively and, given Columbia County’s colorful history, occasionally in a more literal sense.
Columbia County is a place that could host Morris Levy — mob-adjacent legend, music industry kingpin, the man who had John Lennon at his Fourth of July parties like it was the most natural thing in the world — and register no particular alarm. At the same time, my mother once called me out of a lecture hall to report, with genuine outrage, that the boys running the Old Chatham Country Store (before Brian owned it) had run out of Sweet ‘N Low. Like a bar without beer, she said. Both reactions made perfect sense to the people who lived there.
That kind of absurdist inversion is not something you can research. You have to have lived inside it long enough to speak the language. Communities have their own grammar, and fluency only comes one way.
The first installment of the Wine Wars, “The Grapes of Wrath,” was always going to land like a stone in still water. I knew it would delight some readers and offend others, and I knew, more importantly, that there was a real story underneath the entertainment value.
The real story turned out to be about powerlessness — the particular, grinding powerlessness of people who did everything correctly, who attended the meetings and engaged the process and appealed to their elected representatives, only to find that every mechanism designed to produce a fair outcome had somehow been captured by the people it was meant to constrain. Edwin and Cherie Williams’s response to their neighbors’ concerns had the distinctive flavor of Marie Antoinette on a very good day.
The media’s failure to follow stories to their conclusion is not incidental — it is structural. Editors are managing numbers, not narratives. The result is a product, and product is precisely the right word, that bears the same relationship to real news as Naked Juice bears to an actual cold press — owned by PepsiCo, engineered to taste like virtue, delivering none of it. Odwalla: Coca-Cola. Honest Tea: Coca-Cola. Annie’s Homegrown: General Mills. Cascadian Farm: also General Mills. Burt’s Bees: Clorox. Every brand that promised you an alternative to the industrial machine was, at the structural level, the industrial machine. Media is no different. The independents get acquired, the alternatives get absorbed, and what remains is the same concentrated product in slightly different packaging. People sense this even when they can’t articulate it. The duped feeling is real.
What makes the Wine Wars resonate beyond its geography is partly cultural timing. We are living in a moment acutely attuned to the performance of wealth — the Mar-a-Lago aesthetic, the Kardashian sensibility, the entire Vanderpump school of aspirational excess. The Williams’s house on its hill, the plastic surgery fortune, the vineyard-and-wedding-venue ambitions — all of it slots neatly into a narrative grammar that contemporary readers already know how to read. That’s the bar. That’s the appetizers. The meal is something else entirely.
The meal is corruption. It is the town board member who never disclosed his relationship to the property at the center of the dispute. It is the resolution that folded a non-farming estate into an agricultural district because someone knew which lever to pull. It is the meeting at which a local official suggested, with apparent sincerity, that freedom of information laws ought to be abolished. That last one is worth sitting with. An elected official in a democratic municipality, in the year 2025, arguing publicly for the abolition of the public’s right to know. It was a remarkable statement — the kind that passes without consequence in the absence of anyone writing it down.
And this is where the local diverges sharply from the national. In Washington, conflicts of interest have become so normalized as to be almost decorative — a kind of wallpaper everyone has agreed to ignore. In Chatham, the official who fails to recuse himself coached your son’s Little League team. He sat behind you at church last Easter. The betrayal is not abstract. It is personal, and personal betrayal produces a different quality of outrage — one that does not dissipate after the next news cycle because there is no next news cycle to dissipate it. There is only the same town, the same faces, the same Tuesday night meeting.
In a world that has never felt more ungovernable at the federal level, local government retains one unique property: ordinary people can still change it. That sense of agency is not trivial. It is, for many people, the last available mechanism of democratic participation that feels real. When they watch it subverted from the inside, they do not become cynical. They become engaged. The readership of the Wine Wars is, in part, a measure of that engagement.
I will also confess to luck. I had no idea when I started that the story would keep yielding what it has yielded — the tips, the documents, the revelations that kept reshaping what I thought I was writing. That is what an organic story does. It is not packaged by publicists or managed by communications directors. It grows the way real things grow, which is to say messily and without regard for anyone’s preferred narrative.
We are living in the era of the one-night stand in journalism — fast, disposable, immediately forgotten, both parties moving on before morning. No exchange of numbers. No second date. What the Wine Wars seems to have found, in a readership that keeps coming back installment after installment, is an appetite for something that actually calls the next day. People are hungry for the longer relationship — the kind that builds, that remembers what was said last time, that shows up even when the story gets complicated. It turns out that what readers want from journalism is exactly what they want from everything else: something real.
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