Sun Tzu said that if you wait by the river long enough, the bodies of your enemies will eventually float by. It could also be said that if you wait by the great golden river that is the whiskey industry long enough, every blogger, podcaster, and commenter will float by on a gilt bier eventually. This is the way of the industry – if you have a voice and know how to use it, they will want to use it too. I’ve lost count of the number of people who have been subsumed into the whiskey business – maybe some of us who start blogs or social media accounts dedicated to whiskey always have it in the back of our minds that hey, maybe it would be fun to work in the industry. Others come with an oven-ready business plan. This is the ebb and flow – but after a decade of blogging, I’ve had a few run-ins over the years that make me glad I don’t work in whiskey. Sometimes it’s public relations SNAFUs, sometimes it’s producers themselves just behaving shoddily. Some examples:
A few years back, a whiskey producer took it upon himself to sue another whiskey producer for defamation. They hired a lawyer to send threatening letters to the producer over a comment they made, but, and this is the part that baffles me, they also included a list of other accounts in the legal threats, accounts which had nothing to do with any disagreement between the two producers. It came as something of a surprise to see my name featured, along with a number of other bloggers and writers, as I had nothing to do with this person or their whiskey brand. The funniest part of the whole affair (which ended up being resolved outside court) was that my Twitter account got locked because of the legal threats, and at the exact moment this happened, I was at a whiskey launch where the person behind the action happened to be in attendance, sitting about 15 feet away from me.
For the most part, PR firms are great to work with, and having interned in a PR firm one summer about three decades ago, I know how hard they work at what they do. It is a thankless, gruelling job where a lot of time you eat shit from the press, from clients, from everyone. But sometimes it’s the other way around. I asked a PR for comment from a client, telling them it was only for a blog piece and so there was no pressure but I had to ask. They responded by telling me their client was very busy but that they would ask again at a later date. This is where my part in this mess comes in – I saw the ‘again’ and thought that the PR had asked the client for comment and they had declined, so that was what I put in the piece. Hit publish and away we go. A couple of hours later, PR rings, and a tense conversation ensues in which they explain that they didn’t ask the client for comment at all. I apologise and say I misinterpreted their email. Then, PR keeps going – admonishes me for coming to them for comment from their client in the first place, telling me they are not the person to contact for this despite the fact they were happy to provide comment for print pieces previously and they are, after all, a PR person. After I had been given out to for a few minutes, they put forward the suggestion that the best way to remedy this was that they would go back to the client and tell them that I had never contacted them for comment at all. In other words, they would go and tell their client that I had simply made up the quote. I said, no, that is not a good idea, and we ended the call. The problem is that I actually don’t know if they did follow through with their clever plan and tell the client that I never bothered to contact at all, but given the last invite I received to an event being held by the client was rescinded an hour after I got it, I am going to say, maybe.
Much as I love PR people, I’m not sure they are the people you should be commissioning to write features for print. I have seen one PR repeatedly write massive glowing features about a large client of theirs without mentioning the connection – or the fact that what the paper was printing was technically sponsored content. Another PR writes listicles that repeatedly mention clients. If I can see it by only knowing one or two PRs and their clients, then I am going to assume it is a lot more widespread than that. And even if they aren’t mentioning their own clients, who says they aren’t touting for business by heaping praise on other firms? It also sucks because it diminishes the value of a newspaper, and because the PR is getting paid on the double; by the client for the coverage, and by the paper for the copy. Yes, I still have lofty notions about the business of news, but I just think running copy which may or may not be a massive ad is poor form. There are great young writers out there who deserve a break.
That list could run and run. There is a pretty jaw-dropping piece about a drinks publicist which every brand owner should read. I don’t think anyone can wash their hands of the PR firm they choose to rep them and I don’t think any PR firm can wash their hands of their clients no matter how appalling they are. Everyone is a grown-up and everyone knows what they are doing when they choose a PR firm, and every PR makes the same informed choice in taking on a client. So if a PR firm is simply irritating or openly obnoxious to a journalist or drinks writer or anyone, is the writer likely to approach them again for comment? Similarly, journalists and drinks writers can be the absolute worst, entitled, obnoxious, demanding, unbearable brats, so it does work both ways.
But all the bodies eventually float by. Podcasts, blogs, even social media accounts – the most ephemeral of engagements – often dry up as after a while you kinda run out of things to say about whiskey, or you run out of the energy required to keep going. Shared blogs tend to collapse under their own weight as people fall out, or life takes over, podcasts run out of people to talk to, and all the discourse runs out of steam because you end up saying the same things about the same products (I am certainly guilty of that). The mainstream press is also guilty of the same – this time of year there is a crescendo of Irish whiskey coverage and much of it fails to ask the tough question – after Jameson, what now, after America, where then, after the slump, who survives? It probably says a lot about where Irish whiskey is that we don’t have the same rich discourse that Scotch or Bourbon have, and we are poorer for it.
I got a reminder from WordPress that they have been hosting my dithering for ten years now, but for the most part I have only managed a few posts a year since Covid hit. My joy and enthusiasm in the earlier posts when I was just starting to write about Irish whiskey has waned and for the most part I look at the category now with a pretty jaundiced eye. I think there are many structural weaknesses in the sector and I can’t fix them nor can I find anyone else who wants to as much as I. A few years back I wrote a piece about how bright the future would be when we had a rich ecosystem of bloggers, but what we have now is a lot of DM-for-collab style influencers and others who are really just outsourced marketing for the industry. When brands and producers become clients, your words lose value.
Will this blog exist in another ten years, will I still be posting about Irish whiskey, or will it all dry up and blow away as many whiskey blogs do? I still spend more time thinking about the stuff than I do drinking it, and even with a reduced output I still spend more time writing about it than drinking it, so there is life in the old dog yet. The grim times we now inhabit have actually got me interested in it again – the decade of backslapping is over, and it’s time to take stock – can we use this moment to improve the offering, what do people want from Irish whiskey, is it simply whiskey from Ireland or is there more to it, to us? Have we been coasting on our charm, our national identity, in one market and can we replicate that success elsewhere? How do you pitch Irish whiskey to someone in Asia, Africa, South America – do we continue to trade on the shamrocks and shillelaghs, or forty shades of green? Is ‘Brand Ireland’ that well known?
The Scots have single malt, what do we have? Single pot still is too complicated and the name alone gives me a headache, as, aside from anything, it kinda implies that it is made using only one still, or is distilled only once, or that all other Irish whiskey is column distilled. And once you have explained that the name doesn’t mean what you think it means, you get to bore people into submission with a talk about 18th century cereal taxation policy.
Maybe the shakeout of the category is a good time to reflect on what Irish whiskey needs to be. We spent too long pushing ourselves as ‘not Scotch’ (even the single pot still spiel begins with, ‘well you know single malt right…’) and need to find an identity beyond that. Unpeated, triple distilled and smooth were all part of the not-scotch pitch, so what is Irish whiskey now?
Triple Distilled Communications 