Adieu, Bonnezeaux Gonzo!

Looking back, looking forward as a new chapter in wine storytelling begins…

It wasn’t easy, letting Bonnezeaux Gonzo go.

It felt like a superhero hanging their cape. Except it possessed no actual superpowers, save maybe an excess of curiosity and a fair bit of front.

I loved it because it symbolised a new beginning – quite a bold one, I suppose. And I was sad to give it up because it meant something. Its spirit is as alive and, I think, relevant as ever.

The reason it had to go was because Bonnezeaux Gonzo was about me and this venture – Vininspo! – is about you. And I’m not being schmaltzy here. The last phase of my life has convinced me that there’s a mountain of missing links in the wine world. Links that are often logical, not huge leaps of the imagination. Links that lie well within the grasp of a diverse portion of the public who actually like wine. Links that could connect more people to wine and, in so doing, connect more people to each other and the world around them.

Vininspo! Is a wine education and media venture that seeks to join those dots and build those bonds. The seeds of this are clearly sewn in Bonnezeaux Gonzo, so please indulge me while I mourn the passing of its predecessor.

Bonnezeaux Gonzo started out in 2013, and wine was its thing.

My former blog logo, designed by my brilliant friend Nathaniel Kiwi

Wine wasn’t Hunter S. Thompson’s poison when he wrote The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved. He had plenty of other poison going on. But the audacity and flair of that piece of writing left me intoxicated. I read it in a Paris brasserie in 1999, and it was enough to convince me to quit the finance job I’d recently taken up in the French capital. It made me embrace the lunacy of writing as a career.

Fourteen years later and increasingly deskbound in the newsrooms of Sky News and Bloomberg, I missed the shambolic romanticism of that curious misfit, the gonzo journalist. So, upon uprooting the family from London to move back to my wife’s motherland down under, I plunged into something unfathomably huge and fascinating: Wine.

That’s where the Bonnezeaux bit comes from. Literally meaning “good waters” and pronounced “bonzo” it sounds as enchantingly upbeat as the sweet Loire Valley nectar it evokes.

For me, gonzo remains the way to go. I was an immersed outsider, a relative newcomer among myriad authorities in an ancient field. That’s still true – I mean, we all inevitably give off the whiff of arrivisme in a culture that began somewhere round Georgia and Armenia 6,000 years ago.

In the meantime, I’ve spent almost 10 eventful and enlightening years working for a wine importer with a mind-blowing portfolio, and through various means have wrangled the honour of tasting with and grilling a number of talented, experienced brainiacs from every nook and cranny of the global wine cellar.

“I know the ever-evolving subject of wine – where every vine, berry and drop is in a constant state of change – is only ever a snapshot, and one shrouded in mystery and emotion,” I wrote when raising the curtain on Bonnezeaux Gonzo. “This blog is a wide-eyed adventure – and, like wine, it’s supposed to be fun.”

That still rings true, though I’ve come to see some of that mystery as opacity, obfuscation or omission. There is much to be gained from bringing wine into the light, and inviting more people to fully bask in it.

And indeed, the adventure rolls on. Let’s have some fun.

Adieu Bonnezeaux Gonzo; vive Vininspo!