Bring Your Dog to Work Day

Being back on Instagram for a week reminds me why I left.

Yesterday, Friday 20th June, I accidentally participated in Bring Your Dog to Work Day 2025.

Next week it’s National Lightening Safety Awareness Week. This week is vital because lightning strikes can be deadly, causing significant injuries and fatalities each year. My Instagram feed is remarkably quiet about it.

Next week is also English Wine Week, and my Insta feed is already thoroughly drenched with the attention economy rallying around a single cause already. I think my algorithm is skewed for it though.

I’m increasingly becoming numb to the endlessness of Instagram. Everyone has something to say, empty hours of ‘content’, promoting English wines this week, by proxy to promote yourself. Next week it will be something else¹.

For English Wine Week I’m out in the real world. I’ve got tasting events with Fortnum & Mason, Berry Bros & Rudd, Vino Gusto, a couple of restaurants in Norwich where I live, and two big country fairs down the road from the winery.

Promotion as Education.

Promotion requires content. There is a wealth of technical detail in winemaking and viticulture that can fill the void, particularly if presented as educational entertainment.

What are people expecting at a ‘Wine Tasting’? To learn about yeast strains and retronasal inhalation, or to just try some nice wines and have a good time?

Spouting any old generalisations and waggling bottles to camera presented as ‘education’ breeds further confusion. Rather than empowering people, most wine content just reinforces the perception of being able to get it wrong.

If your knowledge extends to tech sheets and press releases, it becomes very easy to repeat the same old tropes.

“Here’s how you swirl.”

“Here’s how to taste.”

“Malolactic Fermentation.”

“What is sulphites?”

Last week I hosted a dinner at The Swan at Shakespeare’s Globe on the South Bank in London. I think in-person connections are so much better for talking about wine, the context, the discussion, the Q&A, these all give room for actual insight.

When I host tastings I often drift (wildly) off-topic into everything any anything about wine in general. People ask the weirdest questions and have been told the stupidest things.

These questions are driven by the commercialisation of faux education that teaches people there’s a way of doing things properly.

I’ll often answer questions with another question because I like to understand why the question is being asked. What’s the motivation behind this enquiry? Are they asking this because it’s something they've been taught is important, or because they’re genuinely interested in the answer.

I’ll often dismiss questions if the answer is commercialised education.

For example:

Question: “How long should I keep wine in the fridge?”

Answer: “Until it tastes weird, precisely the same way you’d treat a carton of orange juice or a pint of milk.”

Nothing more required. No chat about number of days, or time, or sulphites and preservatives, no difference between sweet or dry wines, no difference between fizzy or still, no chat about certain grape varieties.

There are so many non-questions that don’t deserve being asked. At some point the person asking the question has been lead to believe there is an answer specifically related to wine because the simple and obvious answer couldn’t possibly be applied to something so complex.

As long as we continue to ensure people lack confidence, we’ll be able to make a living out of teaching them the obvious, under the guise of education.

So many of the questions I get start with “How should …”, on the assumption that there’s a correct way of doing it.

“How should I choose a bottle of wine?”²

“How should I serve this wine?”³

“How should I store my wine?”⁴

“How should I curtsy when I meet the King?”⁵

“How should I get into wine?”⁶

Dunning–Kruger effect

I’ve seen this over and over, but here it is again.

Someone said to me the other day that the WSET strips away the nuance of wine. Attempting to teach people that wine is done by the text book. I see so many people with a bit of knowledge struggling for opinion or insight.

Some of the questions people asked I wouldn’t have been able to confidently answer with the WSET L3 textbook as my bible.

The point here is that this is true for me; the ‘End of WSET Diploma’ stage was years ago, but I still feel like there’s so much more to know.

I’ve met people studying Level 3 who seem genuinely scared of the complexity of wine. An overwhelming pressure to tackle the burden of knowledge required to understand such a complex topic.

I’m increasingly confused by an industry that takes so much pride in complexity, rallying behind the ‘edutainment’ fallacy. The reduction of wine communication to 10-second reels, increasing view counts at the expense of meaningful insight.

Cognitive Decline?

I read this: Your Brain on ChatGPT

There are parallels with the wine entertainment business. Learning about wine is a slow burn, reducing education to surface level snappy soundbites diminishes that.

Are the long-term cognitive consequences of short form wine content good or bad for consumers? I’ll leave that to you, it’s too complicated.

See you on the long-form.

dk

1. It’s Rabbit Week.

2. Nicest Label under £20.

3. Pour it into a glass, then your mouth.

4. Don’t store it. Drink it.

5. Like this.

6. Jeez, just fucking drink it and enjoy it.