Wine Writer's Workshop

Writing about wine and food is more than just tasting notes, ingredients, and recipes. It can actually be a prism the writer can use to write about people, places, experiences, and ideas. Great wine and food writing gets to the story behind the story and illuminates the motivations and inspirations of wine makers, chefs, restaurateurs, and other food artists.

We'll begin at the beginning: everyone will set up a basic blog and social media feed, and we'll start writing about wine and branching out from there as a class. In this seven-session class, you'll learn skills that apply to both the digital and print world. What are editors and publishers looking for? How do you pitch articles and ideas? Everyone in class will construct a "dream sheet" of powerful story ideas that you'll be confident to go out and sell. We'll study basic structures for wine and food articles, how to write about eating and drinking, ways to construct recipes and tasting notes, and much more. A lot of the class will be spent workshopping articles in progress to help you polish your work and make it the best it can be.

Whether you're already a writer who wants to expand into writing about wine and food, or a writer who's just getting started, this class will help you organize your ideas and focus your efforts. They say you should write about what you know, but better advice is to write about what you love. If you love wine and food and you've always dreamt of writing about them, you owe it to yourself to devote seven Monday evenings to making that dream come true.

ABOUT THE INSTRUCTOR

Jonathon Alsop is a wine writer covering wine, food and travel since 1988. He is author of The Wine Lover's Devotional www.WineLover'sDevotional.com published by Quarry Books, the wine column "In Vino Veritas" as well as many articles for the Associated Press, Frequent Flyer, La Vie Claire, Beverage Business Magazine, Mobil Travel Guides, Fodor's Travel Guides, Boston Globe, and others. In addition to writing about wine, Jonathon founded the Boston Wine School in 2000 where he teaches wine and food classes.