Course Description
Over the past three decades, wine & food criticism has established itself as a journalistic genre. From Robert Parker’s wine scores to New York Times’ Four-Star restaurants, the way journalism has begun to deal with these topics has changed dramatically. This course approaches food&wine writing from a news reporting perspective. In particular, it explores the way in which the largest newspapers and magazines in the world write about wine & food and other popular ways in which the language of wine & food is broadcast, especially social media and blogs. Students will travel into the field to meet people who make and grow what we drink and eat, conducting interviews and collecting information to synthesize into multimedia stories for publication around themes such as health, history, travel, ecology, animal welfare, social change, nutrition, and home cooking.

Course Objectives
By the end of this course, students will be able to:

• summarize the history of food & wine journalism;
• understand food & wine trends and how they arise and develop, all over the world;
• find, report and write compelling stories about food & wine and engage the audience’s attention;
• exhibit working fluency in different modes of food & wine journalism, including restaurant reporting, personal essay, profiles, and recipe-driven essays;
• demonstrate news-gathering skills, including research and interviewing methods;
• use various narrative techniques in news and feature food & wine stories for print, the web, social media platforms (text, photography, video, audio, etc.).

Course Materials
Mandatory course reader; available in digital format

Course Fee
$135.00 – Includes mandatory academic excursions: two dinners and tastings.