You can make the shift to wine writing and succeed. This journalist tells how she did it

Nina Caplan is on a winning streak. After taking Best Drink Writer in 2018’s Fortnum & Mason Awards for her work in The New Statesman, she went on to win Debut Drink Book of the Year in 2019 for her wine travel book The Wandering Vine: Wine, The Romans and Me (Bloomsbury).

That same book also took a Louis Roederer International Wine Writers Award for Wine Book of the Year and she’s now at work on a second title.

As a freelance, she writes mainly about wine, food and travel these days. Yet it’s not so long ago that Nina was an arts journalist, covering film, art, books and theatre. She’s also had a stint in corporate communications: as Chief Editor for Save the Children UK.

Here she speaks to Jenni Muir about negotiating the world of wine and how she conceived the most original wine book of the decade.

The Wandering Vine is an unusual mix of travelogue, history, and memoir. How did you come up with that combo?

I knew I didn’t want to write a straightforward, went-here-and-drank-that sort of book. And I wanted to talk a bit about my family, who were so important to my relationship with wine: it has always seemed very appropriate that I found my grandfather’s birth certificate in a case of Champagne!

Then we took my stepchildren to Rome for a travel article on teaching kids about classical civilisation. We went to Titus’s Arch, to see the engravings of the triumphal procession at the end of the Jewish Wars. I had never seen anything that represented my cultural history that was 2,000 years old before, and it started me thinking about the Romans’ influence – on me, on us as a civilisation, and on wine. In all three cases it was vast. And that became the core of my book.

The publisher approached you…

Yes. It doesn’t happen often, but a young, ambitious editor at Bloomsbury wanted to do something a bit different with wine and reads my New Statesman column. So he got in touch (and I missed the first email – fortunately he followed up!) to suggest I pitch a wine travel book. Then the onus was on me to come up with an idea his boss would like.

I’d say this is less about publishers approaching journalists than the importance of trying to do something a bit differently, so that you have a USP to sell to a publisher, or an agent.

At what point did your agent become involved?

I used having a book deal as a way to get an agent, and I’ll be happy to update this with thoughts on how that makes a difference when I’ve done my second book! I got an advance but not much of one, and the fine print is not very favourable, but then I was a first-time author and they had approached me, so I didn’t have much bargaining power.

One tip: join the Society of Authors. They have lawyers who will look at your contract for you – I did get a couple of small concessions out of Bloomsbury by acting on their advice. The Society of Authors costs £100 a year, it’s a great institution AND they have grants for authors, so when you do get a book off the ground, if you get one of those, it will more than pay for your subscription.

I wanted an agent though – for more support, an extra eye on my proposal/drafts and his insider knowledge. Plus, you can’t have too many people around you who love books when you’re trying to produce one! As for the money, hopefully he will get me at least as much more as to cover his fee, and perhaps more than that.

When we first met at Time Out London magazine you were writing arts and features. How did wine become your main gig and why?

COMPLETE accident. I have always been interested in wine, because my father was. In my second job, as Deputy Features Editor of The European (remember that?) I wrote a piece on port, just because... well... I don’t know why. That was the only wine writing of mine my father ever got to read.

Then I did a little wine column for dummies for Metro, when I worked there, and another for London Lite, for its short lifespan, and the occasional piece on things like the world’s most expensive bottle for the Daily Mail.

And I went to a lot of tastings, trying to build up my knowledge, and on a couple of wine trips. So when my Mail commissioning editor joined the New Statesman and asked me to write their wine column I was able to say yes. And it was pure luck that she said they didn’t want a recommendations piece, but something more interesting. Recommendations take up so much room... and I personally hate the current obsession with tasting notes. I love wine because it is endlessly and variously interesting. And that’s what I try to write about.

To what extent did you try to adopt a particular style of writing for the book?

I only have one style of writing really! I tried to be clear, and to avoid any pontificating about wine. Or history. But mainly wine. My father was one of the most interesting men I have ever met but I can still recall the weight of boredom that descended when he started talking about wine. Now I like to think I’d be fascinated, but it’s too late…

What was your book writing process like – how did you organise yourself?

“Organise yourself” sounds too, well, organised! I researched on a series of trips and wrote between them. I read enormously – I’m not a classicist and I wanted to get that stuff right. So the most organised element was me deciding that I would only read relevant material for the year. I was so pleased to turn back to fiction at the end! But I learned so much, which was wonderful.

And I had to write in between earning a living, since book advances to first-time non-fiction authors don’t allow for time off. So it was a bit chaotic. Add to that the fact that I live between London and Burgundy (where my stepchildren are) and travel for work… and that even at home I rarely use my desk and prefer to write at the dining table, on the sofa, occasionally in bed… it was pretty chaotic. I had several plans for structure and stuck to none of them. I had a lot of fixing to do in the draft stage, but at least a travel book to some extent structures itself. Next book I will be better organised!

How was it different from writing a wine article for a magazine or newspaper?

The need for structure was the major difference – apart, obviously, from length and the amount of research. Quite often with an article I discover what I’m really writing about halfway through and have to go back and change earlier parts to fit. I did that a bit with my book but I needed more coherence or it would have been a shambles.

One thing I found helpful was to just start, knowing I could fix things later – a luxury that article deadlines don’t usually allow for in quite the same in-depth way. I always remember John McPhee’s comment to the effect that you can’t fix what isn’t there. Nobody’s first draft is a masterpiece.

Which writers have influenced your style? I’m particularly interested in those who are not wine writers.

I’m not sure any are wine writers as such, although some have written about wine! AJ Liebling did, but he was the New Yorker’s World War 2 correspondent in France and wrote about sport, the press, New York. MFK Fisher wrote about wine only in the sense that she wrote about food: she said that her real subject was hunger. To which I would add: and thirst. Sybille Bedford knew a lot about wine and her writing is scattered with mentions of it as part of life, which is how I try to incorporate it into my writing.

Others? Lots of Russians, although mainly in English (I studied Russian at University but never reached the stage of reading those long novels in the original): Tolstoy, Bulgakov, Nabokov. And lots of French writers, this time in the original: Voltaire, Baudelaire, Proust. But actually I think everyone you ever read influences you.

As a child I was a sponge for words, phrases, stories. I remember reading and loving a Scott Fitzgerald novel (I can’t remember which, I read and loved them all, and the short stories) but also loving the review quote on the back: ‘His style sings of hope, his message is despair.’ There’s a whole other novel in that!

Oh – talking of short stories – Alice Munro. And Mavis Gallant. I love them both.

You've been speaking at various literary festivals. What are aspects of the book and/or wine writing do audiences respond most to?

They really like it when they get a glass of wine! But joking aside, it is quite weird talking about wine without drinking any. People like the personal history and the demystification of wine – the emphasis on the personal aspect of drinking it. Your tastebuds are yours alone, I can’t tell you what something tastes like, even if I can make suggestions! Wine writing is much too prescriptive at the moment.

They also like the history. Someone asked me the other day about the English passion for port. I pointed out that when we went to war with Napoleon, it stopped us drinking French wine, both for patriotic reasons and practical ones – the wines couldn’t get here! And that this was a great boon to the Spanish and Portuguese wine industries. Tangential history – a new aspect of an old story – is often the most interesting kind.

Looking at wine writing in a broad sense – where is it now and where do you think it needs to go?

It is more popular, which is great, and more female, which is too, although there’s still a way to go. There’s no longer the sense (and Jancis Robinson has been instrumental in this) that you have to be a man to know about wine. And if it is still very white and middle-class – well, that is still who drinks wine, and it is our job to change that. It has to work that way round, I think.

But the middle ground that I prefer, between How To Taste It and real geekery, still seems under-occupied. There’s too much emphasis on tasting notes, and on doing things right (or wrong). All this natural wine preoccupation is part of that. I prefer an emphasis on good wine – and an acknowledgement that so-called ‘low intervention’ is idiotic. If you don’t intervene you get vinegar, not wine.

I also love the stories around wine – the history and myths – and wish that there was more emphasis on these very human elements and less on winemaking technique or flavour profile (some of which I’m afraid I find rather boring). Things used to be different, which is why the Bible contains over 800 references to wine!

What advice do you have for people hoping to develop their wine writing?

Drink lots! As widely as possible. And taste lots – I hate huge tastings but there’s no denying they are the most efficient (and healthiest, as long as you spit) way to try a lot of wine. Talk to people. Some winemakers are dull but most have much more to them than a technical ability to create good wine (and in fact, the same could be said of wine-lovers of drinking good wine. Or wine writers of writing about it…). Find a way (scientific, historical, descriptive, personal or something else entirely) to write about wine that suits you. There will be one – it is the broadest subject I know!

It’s so important to remember that wine covers all of life – science, agriculture, history, politics, sociology, the vagaries of human nature… Leaving out everything except taste is like describing Winston Churchill by mentioning his eye colour and leaving it at that. And you can’t learn about wine, really, without visiting vineyards and talking to winemakers. I don’t think (although I’m biased!) you can do a lot of travelling in gastronomically vibrant places without falling in love with wine.

I’m glad I speak French, because they have such a facility with wine descriptions (which I don’t necessarily want to emulate but it’s useful to see how it’s incorporated into the language in a way it isn’t with ours). But you can learn interesting, useful words, like linguistic personality tics, even in languages you don’t speak. Today I learned that upatlaný refers to dishes of food that have been over-meddled with. I could use that for wine. I probably will.

Follow Nina on Instagram @ninacaplan, or Twitter @ninacaplan

Photo William Craig Moyes