Halfway through my first drink with Hannah Crosbie, the London-based Scottish wine writer, I was struck by the thought that she is, perhaps, the first important wine person I’ve spoken to who doesn’t have any ideological scars from the 2010s. Her excuse for missing out on the premier era of polarization and dogma in the wine world is that, for most of that decade, she was outside wine’s target demographic. This is an airtight excuse. Crosbie, 27, was unleashed upon the U.K. wine scene sometime in 2020 like a fully formed, shitposting Athena of Aligoté. She has since become the harbinger of a new kind of wine critic: wickedly funny, clever and utterly unconcerned with the fights that have animated the previous generations.
Unlike so much scenester-baiting contemporary wine writing (I regretfully include in this category literally everything I have written), Crosbie’s focus is on people who actually might want to buy wine, rather than on scoring points with her peers. This strategy has proven to be a runaway success. Her book, Corker: A Deeply Unserious Wine Book, came out this year, and she is well on her way to becoming a household name on both sides of the Atlantic. On her recent swing through New York, I met her at a very bad bar in Soho to discuss how she views her job at The Evening Standard, what she thinks of wine culture right now and, crucially, where she thinks it’s going.
John McCarroll: Hi. Uh, what are you vaping?
Hannah Crosbie: So, it is actually quite sad because, um, I usually smoke grape, OK? I smoke grape. It’s very on brand. It’s the only vape flavor I’ve ever tried. I was very much antivape until maybe about two months ago. And then I smoked an entire packet of cigarettes in a day and thought I was gonna die. I was a big cigarette girl. Big smoker. Big vape shamer.
So, I’m a bit embarrassed. I kind of have my tail between my legs now. This color… in the U.K., it’s grape. Here, it’s “berry mix.” It does not taste like berries in any way, shape or form. I work in wine. I know what I taste. I know what a berry tastes like. This is not berries.
Well, that’s the softball. We’re gonna start now. I guess my real question is, what do you think your bit is? What are you doing?
Wine for me, it’s the combination of a lot of different things that I love: gastronomy, anthropology, agriculture, farming. I used to make cider with my dad when I was a kid in the back garden. There was a tree that was nearby—an enormous apple tree, so we’d make very small batches of cider. Me and my two sisters would work the press. I guess that’s the only reason to have three daughters—so they can make your cider. It’s very medieval.
I think that I occupy quite a unique spot in the industry, in that no one really does what I do. Which is really cool, but it’s always been that way. I was a weird kid. I tried to be a cool teenager. I tried for years and now I’m just a weird adult… I think I just sort of bring my weirdness and bring whatever I want to do to an industry that I love, [but] a lot of traditional groups either didn’t want me, or didn’t get me. So I’ve kind of started doing my own thing. I’ve been listening to a lot of podcasts at the moment, people saying, “Don’t ask the audience what they want. Just be yourself. Give them what you want to do and people will respond.”
“I think that my new hot take for the autumn is that the wine industry cannot complain about young people not buying wine when they’re not selling it to young people.”
What is a traditional wine industry person like?
There’s a very traditional idea of what a wine writer is supposed to look like, sound like and write like, and I’m not any of those things. You sort of think of trad wine writers as, like, very upper class, upper middle class. People who speak in a certain way, which is not [the person] the consumer recognizes—which is who you’re relying on to buy your wine. That never made sense for me. I think that my new hot take for the autumn is that the wine industry cannot complain about young people not buying wine when they’re not selling it to young people. Which sounds obvious, but it’s not really a thing.
A lot of what you create seems to be, at least currently, for the average consumer. Is that intentional for you?
A hundred percent. The businesses that sell and create and do things for specialists [i.e., enthusiasts] already exist. Right? They’re already buying all the wine. I’ve just been on a book tour and I speak to people and they’ll be like, “Oh, I love wine, but it’s not really for me.” And I’m like, “How often do you drink wine?” [And they’ll say] “maybe, like, two, three times a week.” Can you imagine if you said, “I play chess two, three times a week, but I don’t really know anything about chess?”
A lot of what I do is hand-holding, from casual drinkers to more engaged inquisitive drinkers. Under lockdown, natural wine was having an enormous boom. That proved that young people are prepared to spend 40 pounds [Editor’s note: about $50] on a bottle of wine. I think that proved that people were like… [“Don’t Look Back in Anger” begins playing at the bar.] Oh my god, Oasis, oh my god, these guys are following me everywhere.
From the outside, your career arc seems really similar to an arc in food media—food influencers. I’m thinking Pierce Abernathy, Molly Baz, Alison Roman. Is that one that you see in yourself?
I always take stuff like this as a compliment: good day to be me, bad day to be Alison Roman. I have a lot of friends in food—probably more than in wine. Obviously our cultural touch points would be slightly different, but I know exactly the kind of person you’re talking about.
There is this new generation of food and drink [and] wine and bar professionals kind of bubbling away under the surface, but modern media isn’t really too sure where to put us. We’ve worked our entire careers thus far working to get to the point of being, like, the critic or the TV chef or whatever, but the people that we looked up to when we were younger are still in those roles. Why would they leave? They’re the best jobs in the world…
It’s very strange ’cause now there’s all this talent with not many places to go. The industry doesn’t quite know what to do with us. If I were to ever be asked to be a wine critic, one of the main reasons they would probably do so—and I think it’d be naive to suggest otherwise—is that they’re trying to lower their average readership by about 5 years.
By, like, 500 years.
Five hundred years. Yeah. But then that raises the question, do young people want to read a wine column anymore? Or do they want to watch videos? I think traditional media is sort of on its last legs.
“For me, so much of wine is situation-based. I always try and relate it to myself, someone who is working in London, perpetually skint, from a low-income background. Not posh; Scottish.”
I’m trying to find a polite way of asking this: Why does wine writing suck so much?
The reason a lot of wine writing sucks is the reason that perfume ads suck. How can you sell something that’s so about being in the moment? You can’t. It’s the same way that you watch a perfume ad and you’re like, what is going on? It’s this kind of visual and verbal acrobatics to get people to [buy].
Are you a Jeremy Fragrance fan?
[Laughs.] Yeah. That’s why I was in Miami, OK. It’s like a smell. That’s why a lot of wine media doesn’t work. How can you get people to appreciate this incredibly sensory experience that you have to be there for? So you kind of use all these verbal gymnastics, which comes across as wanky. Or you can be really to the point and simple, but then it comes across as basic and no one will buy it. It’s a really difficult balance to strike in the same way that you have a perfume advert and you’ve got some kind of James Bond opening title sequence vibe to show what a product smells like.
I find that a lot of wine critics, when they’re trying to be cool, reach for rock-and-roll or sex comparisons with wine, which is, like, the worst from a wine writer.
“Wine is like a car.” “Wine is a lot like making love to a beautiful woman.”
That’s what they tell me.
When I write about wine—which some people have described as self-absorbed—I’m gonna stick to my guns because I think it’s important. I always relate to personal experiences where you might drink wine and then that turns into why you might like it, what it tastes like.
For me, so much of wine is situation-based. I always try and relate it to myself, someone who is working in London, perpetually skint, from a low-income background. Not posh; Scottish. With all of these different things that everyone’s like, “Oh yeah, this girl gets it. She’s knowledgeable but she’s still like me.” And I think that only by relating it to my own situations and experiences, which are every normal woman’s experiences. I think that’s how I sort of break it down and make it more relatable.
So I wanna talk more about influencers. People get weird about the term “influencers,” which I think is just because people get weird about women in media—
Because of sexism. Because people are sexist. Sorry, were you going to finish the question first?
“I think that a lot of the repulsion for influencers is entirely rooted in misogyny.”
What do you think the role of the influencer is versus more traditional critics? Why are they so successful?
Well, anyone can become an influencer and there are like four people who can become a wine critic. And those four people might be amazing and cool and incredible at the job, but they might not be who the market wants to listen to. I think that if I was ever kind of shitting on influencers, that would be to deny my entire come-up, because that’s how people first connected with me in lockdown. That’s when I started doing well for myself and people started reading my wine reviews. Without having social media and a blog, I wouldn’t have had examples of my own work to show to editors and then get commissioned.
Bouncing off what you said, I think that a lot of the repulsion for influencers is entirely rooted in misogyny. I always see male wine journalists that have hundreds—well, not hundreds, but tens of thousands of followers. No one calls them influencers, but we’re all doing the same thing. It’s just that there is that sort of visual language with “influencers.” I’m wiggling my fingers in [air quotes] right here.
I have a lot of ride-or-die people in the industry and they really support me. But there is still that very tired stereotype that persists. I’ve heard that people say I’ve used sex to get ahead in the industry, as opposed to my talent or my craft or anything else. That really hurt me because A, it’s categorically untrue. But B, I would jokingly wonder, how far could I have got had I thrown the cat around?
OK, imagine you were in charge of wine. What changes are you implementing?
If I was in charge of wine… I’d make it easier for people to sell it. I would also offer free vocational courses for young people that think that it might be something that they want to go into. People are always like, “Oh, I dunno why there aren’t more young people in wine from different backgrounds.”
It’s because when I was growing up, I thought the only two jobs in wine were sommelier and Guy on TV That Drinks Wine. I don’t think that you realize until you’re in the industry just how many different jobs there are, that there’s an entire section of—not just the industry, but of a country’s economy, that kids are completely unaware of… When I say kids, I mean legally drinking-age people, obviously.
What do you think will be cool next year?
I think that what people are inferring through introducing trends is that now everyone will have to change what they were already doing. It’s like, “Forget all the other stuff you used to drink, now you need to get on to this.” For me, you need to, instead of jumping from one trend to another, you need to be collecting these things, having them become part of your arsenal. Don’t forget about the old stuff and just jump on the next thing. That being said, I think there should be a trend of drinking everything, any time of the year.
We’ve adopted a lot of French drinking habits, like red wine in the winter and rosé when it’s hot. I think this really cuts off learning for a lot of the year and restricts drinkers stylistically. If you only want to drink rosé for refreshment purposes, then you’re ignoring a whole section of the market: rosés with a bit different color, that are a bit more tannic that you might wanna enjoy in autumn. Or if you’re only drinking red wines in winter, then you’re really missing out on a chilled red. So I think that abandoning seasonality is in vogue for me. I’m very aware that when people ask me for trend advice, I just give ideas of what I want to personally see.
Editor’s note: This conversation has been edited for length, clarity and to avoid annoying digressions, and because halfway through the interview the interviewer’s mother called.
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