The 1WineDude Abides: Our Joe Roberts Interview
The word Dude in our culture is held in high esteem. It’s typically reserved for the special and elite among us. Think Jeff Spicoli, Jeffrey Lebowski, Lao Tzu, Bill and Ted, Julia Child and Joe Roberts..aka 1WineDude. Dude is one of the most entertaining and interesting words in any language, it means so many different things. In fact, it can mean everything. People can even converse saying nothing else but Dude. Dude, where’s my wine?
Joe Roberts, for many in the wine blogging world, is simply 1WineDude. He writes with comedic flair and intimacy. He reviews wines and wine trends, then makes us feel as though we know exactly what he means. His posts come with genuine wit and we don’t come away from his writing feeling adorned with polite, formal bullshit. Jeff Lefevere remarked that reading Roberts was like reading someone “doing a raucous stand-up comedy routine while sprinting on a treadmill.”
So while the 1WineDude takes writing about wine seriously, he is able to stand back and look at wine for what it is. Tastes good, sometimes great and leaves a nice buzz in its wake.
We asked the 1WineDude or “Duder, His Dudeness, Or El Duderino, if, you know, you’re not into the whole brevity thing...” to talk with us about his work, his passion.
Your writing style is so accessible, so transparent. Does it come naturally to you while writing about wine or is it instinctive?
Well – first off thanks for that! Also, I like to begin answering questions with “Well” but in my mind it’s being sung by Johnny Cash, since he starts about 2/3rds of his songs with that. “Welllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllll…..”
Anyway… I suppose it comes naturally because I don’t really think too much about it. My undergrad degree is in English Literature, so I had the good fortune to have been forced to write quite a bit and when you wait until the 11th hour finish your papers… let’s just say that it prepares you for having to absorb something about your subject quickly and then write about it quickly, which is a great primer for blogging. I don’t advocate using that as a model, by the way, unless you happen to enjoy stress.
I’d say that a slightly different Joe Roberts persona turns up for 1WineDude.composts. It’s me, but the voice is amplified, kind of like how a Napa Cab blend can sometimes feel like a Bordeaux on steroids. Did that make sense? Forget it… I think I’ll just answer the next question…
You write like I drink. It seems like you stumble upon pleasure or taste and then kind of stand back amused by it all.
Wait a minute, you stumble upon wine? I want your job, because that sounds very cool! I picture Adam West, in full-on Batman TV series attire, kind of stumbling around the set with one hand raised up slightly, only in his hand a wine glass appears. BAM! Damn, that would be awesome…
I think what you’re describing is a sort of bemused attachment. I do go for that vibe, because wine is not a serious subject. Global warming = serious. Conditions that contribute to the rise of tyranny or terrorism = serious. Wine = Not serious. I mean, if 9/11 happened again tomorrow, would you give a crap about wine until it was clear that things had calmed down, that we had started to deal with the grief and the rebuilding? I sure as hell wouldn’t. On the whole, the wine world needs a better sense of itself and where it fits into our universe, which is definitely NOT at the center!
You possess both the Level 2 (Intermediate, with Distinction) and Level 3 (Advanced, with Merit) Certificates in Wine & Spirits from the Wine & Spirit Education Trust. What is it about wine that drove you to become so academic, so learned?
Greed. Also, I test well. I was really into wine and I love to learn, and I love to meet people. My Strength Finders profile is like all “Woo” and “Learner.” So I was just absorbing all of the wine stuff like a sponge, and my wife said (paraphrasing here): “Hey, why don’t you monetize that?” I wasn’t sure if I knew enough to do that so I decided to start exploring it as a potential “early retirement vehicle” (this is pre-economic meltdown, obviously).
So… I started with the WSET because it seemed well-respected. The guys at PhillyWine.com talked to me after the WSET Intermediate exam and said something like “are you going for the Advanced? Because you’ve tied for the best Intermediate score that we’ve ever had.” I guess I more-or-less just took it from there once they gave me the vote of confidence that I could actually contribute something to wine world. My intention was to consult, and blog on the side for fun, but the blog took off and I’ve got no time for consulting now!
Honestly, what do you make of the big guys like Gallo and others who still don’t seem to get social media?
I suppose we can’t fault people for not instantly adjusting to some new trends after decades of things working one way, which was one-way messages coming from TV, radio, print, and then Internet. But the tide has irrevocably shifted, and the excuses have basically dried up at this point as being inexcusable. Every wine brand that has a marketing strategy needs to have social media as part of that strategy – period. There is more than enough evidence now in terms of raw numbers to demonstrate that consumption of media as something social is the Internet now.
What’s interesting about Gallo is that they’re so big, they don’t seem to be able to leverage the work that some of their properties have already done, like Barefoot. They need to do better than that or they’ll lose market share eventually. It really is as simple as that.
I think if the big boys want to leap-frog competitors in this space, they should look to the pool of wine bloggers (as Murphy-Goode and St. Supery already have), and hire people from that pool. I mean, some of those people are already doing the job very well, and if they can harness the talent of some of those resources for their brand then it’s a win-win for the industry.
Take St. Supery for example – through hiring a blogger, and working seriously with emerging players like TasteLive.com (holding a Twitter Taste Live event should be very high on the priority list for large wine brands right now), St. Supery has really spearheaded their on-line marketing and are well into using it effectively and it took them very little time to do that. That’s a potential competitive advantage when you’re trying to reach the next generation of wine consumers.
What they most need to realize I think is that the days of predicting a given rate of return in sales tied to one-way marketing efforts are very quickly disappearing. Part of what they need to do now is devote time and resources into expanding their potential reach on-line – even if it doesn’t translate into direct sales figures yet. I realize that selling this to top brass is extremely difficult especially in publicly-traded companies. But if it was easy, everyone would have figured it out and done it already – my answer to that is “suck it up, nothing worth doing for long-term gain is ever easy!”
You seem pretty grounded in the reality of what millennials respond to. Why the seeming disconnect with some of the more established brands?
They’re probably old, and they’re thinking old because it’s easier and it’s what they’ve been doing for a long time. You don’t need to be young to think like a younger generation. Hell, I’m not young!
Why does music fit so well with wine?
Beats me. Ha-ha! Get it? Beat? Music? Ah, whatever…I think both of them are, at heart, artistic expressions that can be expressed with purity or abused and commercialized. They’re kind of kindred spirits, really.
I love so many forms of music, it would be impossible for me to nail down favorites, really. A short list would include The Beatles, Rush, King’s X, Ray Brown, Bootsy Collins, Iron Maiden, Bela Fleck, Muddy Waters, Paul Simon, Jamiroquai, The Smiths, Morrissey, Nat King Cole, Beethoven, Mahler, Miles Davis, the Rollins Band, The Who, Dr. Didg, Yes, Crash Test Dummies, Neil Young, Indigo Girls, Living Colour, The Temptations, Mahler, Toad The Wet Sprocket, Tower Of Power, Willie Dixon, & just about anyone else you can imagine…
Who do you most want to party with?
Welllllllllllllllllllllllllll…..You. Because you ask interesting questions and could probably hook us up witha continuous flow of free wine until we both passed out.
Let’s say you weren’t available… then I’d have to divide this into Living / Dead (but not the Living Dead because let’s face it, those guys do NOT know how to party):
Dead – Ben Franklin. Call me a homer, but a person with a better combination of partying and intelligence has hardly ever been seen in our history. Not only could he party, but he could figure out the best ways to party! He also dug beer & wine – a prerequisite for partying with me for reasons that I hope are obvious.
Living – Is it ok for me to just say “Drew Barrymore” and leave it at that? I mean, I don’t know who’s going to be reading this so…
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http://www.winesooth.com Arthur
