This blog is young, but there’s already been a big change since it started out in November 2013. Crucially, I’ve gone from being a thoroughly independent freelance journalist to an in-house writer for a wine importer and distributor. The company’s called CellarHand and is based in Melbourne. So the independence has kind of gone out the window.
But the journey goes on, and so does Bonnezeaux Gonzo, albeit irregularly. The one change is that I won’t be posting any tasting notes on wines whose producers I represent. I will tap into the thoughts of these winemakers where they have something to say that I think can rock this little blog along.
So to backtrack, I’m Ed Merrison, a former journalist living on the Mornington Peninsula. This is my blog, and wine is its thing.
Wine wasn’t Hunter S. Thompson’s poison when he wrote The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved. He had plenty of other poison going on. But the audacity and flair of that piece of writing left me intoxicated. I read it in a Paris brasserie, and it was enough to convince me to quit the finance job I’d recently taken up in the French capital. It made me embrace the lunacy of writing as a career.
Fourteen years later and increasingly deskbound in the newsrooms of Sky News and Bloomberg, I missed the shambolic romanticism of that curious misfit, the gonzo journalist. So I plunged into something unfathomably huge and fascinating: Wine. Hence Bonnezeaux, a sound as enchanting as the sweet Loire Valley nectar that it evokes.
For me, gonzo’s the only way to go. I’m an immersed outsider, a relative newcomer among myriad authorities in an ancient field. And I know the ever-evolving subject of wine – where every vine, berry and drop is in a constant state of change – is only ever a snapshot, and one shrouded in mystery and emotion.
This blog is a wide-eyed adventure – and, like wine, it’s supposed to be fun.