Mark Fisher, a friend of LENNDEOVURS and owner of Uncorked wrote an interesting post this morning in response to a Decanter.com story about  the demise of Wine X magazine and
its editor’s complaints that the wine industry’s ignorance and
short-sightedness doomed the magazine to failure after eight years.

Mark, never one to pull punches, refers to the editor as a crybaby and I tend to agree after reading the piece.

Is the wine industry often snobby, uppity, stuffy and "old school"? Yes. But I expect that anyone with the ambition to start a wine magazine would recognize that from the very beginning-not just complain about it after they were unable to succeed in it.

Given Wine X’s target audience-younger, ‘hipper’ wine drinkers-why would they use the same ole delivery method that Wine Spectator uses for a vastly different-and more focused on-demographic?

I read at least 90% of my wine news/information online and my guess is that most people in my age group do the same.

So maybe instead of blaming the industry, Wine X should look at it’s model and get a better understanding of it’s target audience.

Not to mention, the few issues that I’ve picked up (and put back down) haven’t impressed me. The writing tries way too hard to be trendy and hip and is often short on substance.

It’s entirely possible that there isn’t a market for a wine magazine that targets the "younger generation" but that doesn’t mean that those people aren’t hungry for wine information. You just need to be smart enough to get it in front of them. I think that publishing/publishers in general haven’t quite caught on yet-and I’m not just talking about wine publications.