PARIS-Once in a while a story comes along that straddles my two areas of journalistic interest: wine and the media. So it is with the growth of paid-for digital publications that focus on very specific wine regions or niches.
The latest journal of this type focuses on so-called natural wines-that is, those that are made with minimal intervention in the winemaking process, and with little or no recourse to additives like sulfur dioxide, a preservative. It is called the Feiring Line, named for Alice Feiring, a writer based in New York who specializes in these wines from all over the world.
Ms. Feiring's publication, a digital newsletter that is to be published 10 times a year, is set to appear for the first time around Oct. 25, she said. It builds on a blog by Ms. Feiring, which has long been one of the better sources on the Web for information on natural wines.
While publishers of many general-interest publications have struggled to get readers to pay for their content in the digital world, wine seems to draw the kinds of customers who are willing to pony up. Well-known critics like Robert Parker and Jancis Robinson have long had paid-for sites, offering comprehensive coverage of wine news and ratings of individual wines from around the world to their subscribers.
Free wine sites have also proliferated in the blogosphere. A more recent trend is the growth of paid digital newsletters like Ms. Feiring's, with coverage of narrower areas of focus.
One of the first publications of this kind was Burghound.com, a quarterly written by Allen Meadows, devoted to Burgundy. This was followed by sites like ChampagneGuide.net, by Peter Liem, and drinkrhone.com, by John Livingstone-Learmonth, focusing on the wines of the Rhone Valley.
True, the audiences for sites like these are probably limited to professionals or wine geeks, but they serve a useful purpose, providing readers with advance information and wine ratings fro m critics with real enthusiasm for their subjects.
In the case of natural wines, specialized information is especially useful because many mainstream critics still give these wines short shrift. Mr. Parker, for example, has stated that he is not a fan. I am a fan, but I admit to making an occasional expensive mistake with a natural wine that did not live up to my expectations or its price.
Included in the first edition, Ms. Feiring said, will be reports on gamay, the red grape in Beaujolais, including coverage of new producers in the area. There will also be reports on granite vineyard terroirs and a feature on Jean-Yves Bizot, an iconoclastic Burgundy producer.
Ms. Feiring used Kickstarter, a so-called crowd-sourcing service, to raise $17,000 in financing for her newsletter before its introduction. She said she had sold 200 subscriptions so far, at a cost of $65 per year.
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