Even More Bad Whiskey Writing

By Richard Thomas

Eight months have passed since the last installment in our periodic series on bad whiskey writing in the mainstream media, but there has been no shortage of boredom, hack work, ignorance, sloppiness and lack of acuity during that time. This even if we leave aside the tide of yellow journalism that yet again washed in, story after repetitive story, on the faux “Great American Whiskey” shortage.

Just as it did in 2013, Buffalo Trace’s announcement of its continuing difficulty in meeting demand for some of its products was turned into a media campaign designed to scare American whiskey enthusiasts into making a run on their local liquor stores. This category of bad whiskey writing, with most of the articles in it drawing on just one source and offering no real insight into the issue, was so widespread in the media as to defy detailed comment in the short space here. Besides, we have other fish to fillet.

The Business Insider Strikes Again
It’s well-known that Business Insider is one of the most awful sites on the web, rivaling the properties of Demand Media for mediocrity. This is so much the case that many wonder how such a terrible website can do so well. The Whiskey Reviewer wonders too, given how dreadful their whiskey content is.

This article on whiskey facts by Courtney Comstock is a perfect example of the kind of sloppy fact-checking that dogs everything I see out of Business Insider on the subject of whiskey. Of the 18 “facts” cited in her article, seven are either partly or completely wrong.

The Comstock article dates to 2010, and we’ve spotlighted it in the past. A more recent example is this piece from Melissa Stanger on the best Scotch whiskies, which only repeated information from FindTheBest with no new insight. That amounts to an aggregator sourcing from another aggregator.

Jingoism Dies But Slowly
When the Japanese company Suntory announced it would buy Beam Global in January 2014, it occasioned an ugly outbreak of racially charged nationalism that was thankfully confined mostly to trollish internet forums and letters to the editor, although some examples appeared in the mainstream press. Another smaller outbreak appeared when the deal actually went through in May 2014. Yet for some strange reason, Muncie, Indiana’s The Star Press thought it necessary to publish this jingoist opinion piece in April, in the middle and when things had quieted down.

Ignorance or Bias?
Although any list of top bourbons must necessarily include some of the highly esteemed offerings of Buffalo Trace Distillery, The Street’s Andrew Meola displayed a devotion to the Frankfort, Kentucky distillery in his “The 8 Best Bottles of Bourbon” that crossed into the ridiculous. While some of his choices for the top eight are truly off base (within the Buffalo Trace portfolio itself are offerings superior to the listed Benchmark and Buffalo Trace), what truly damns his article is that all eight come from Buffalo Trace Distillery, and Buffalo Trace alone. Judging from his comments, Meola might not have even been aware that all eight were made at Buffalo Trace when he penned the article.

Foolish Indeed
The Motley Fool comes a close second to Business Insider when it comes to its lack of insight into the whiskey business. Take this article by Rich Duprey, who so badly misunderstood the 2014 Tennessee Whiskey Law fracas that he thought it was about Jack Daniel’s vs. George Dickel.

The wrangling in the Tennessee state capitol was started by British drinks giant Diageo not to protect George Dickel, a property they had largely neglected until last year, but Johnnie Walker. Jack Daniel’s, owned by Brown-Forman, is the world’s second-best selling whiskey, and is fast closing in on the top dog, Johnnie Walker. This was widely commented upon at the time, yet somehow Duprey managed to miss it months later.

Whiskey And Oil Don’t Mix
The last two-thirds of 2014 also saw a trickle of bad articles comparing the whiskey and oil businesses in some way. The first was probably this Vox article by Matthew Yglesias dated May 30, where he declared that the whiskey business could help conquer its supply and demand problems by looking to the futures markets.

Nevermind that such a declaration is exactly the sort of thing one might expect from a B-grade term paper in a junior year, college economics class. Nevermind that many point to speculative trading, such as is done on the futures market, for the volatility that has beset the price of oil during the last several years. The main point of wretchedness is that, strangely, Yglesias wrote an article he didn’t believe in himself, since he spent the last couple of paragraphs trashing his own idea.

Then came America’s “paper of record,” The New York Times. For many years now I’ve felt that The New York Times had slipped badly, as every other article I read from them contained serious and easily identified factual errors, and was basically coasting on its reputation. This is so much the case that I treat writing for The New York Times nowadays not as a note of merit, but as a red flag.

Such was the case when Neil Irwin took the opposite approach as Yglesias, stating that it was the oil industry who could learn something from the whiskey trade in taming its price volatility. His logic and insight were so faulty that I don’t need to dismantle them here, because Forbes already did it for me.