McInerney as "Noah Shapiro" on GG

You just never know what he’s going to do next.  After a brief stint as Brooklynite Dan’s “writing mentor” on Gossip Girl, brooding in the dark corners of Puck Fair, Jay McInerney has resurfaced in another equally bizarre place: in the pages of the Wall Street Journal, as their new wine critic.  Qualifications? I’m not sure. I’d say “successful writer,” but those skills haven’t seemed to translate to his column (see Gawker’s scathing review here.  How can a wine evoke Julianne Moore?). Then there’s his oenophile-nature (he does have two previous collections on wine)… but the closest he seems to come to an actual description is “dry, relatively rich.”  I’ve taken a wine class or two and I could have told you that! As much as I like my wine columns to read like narrative essays, I also like them to explain to me just why I would spend, oh, say, more than twenty bucks on a bottle of rose champagne, even if all of the sudden it is more fashionable to leave the grape skins in the barrel a bit longer.

So what’s next for McInerney? Maybe repackaging all of his earlier books so that they’re fresh and relevant again?

Oh, done.  Will it ever end?