A Conversation with James Hansen

The wine world is a very complicated one, with its own language and its own rules. While that’s being challenged, invigorated, and misunderstood in equal measure with the big cultural emergence of natural wine, it can still feel far too difficult and far too vast to navigate as a newcomer. Writers and editors like Layla Schlack—associate managing editor for print at Wine Enthusiast—challenge that narrative. With her own soothing, clear-eyed voice and her ability to spot and nurture new writing talent in what’s understood as a fussy space, she’s been key to opening up this world with her work. “Racism, misogyny and ableism are alive in the wine world,” she told me when I brought up how snobbery manifests in the world as a possible topic for conversation. “These things aren't the same as snobbishness, to me, but they are adjacent, and they are a form of gatekeeping that turns a lot of people off from learning about wine. Change is happening, and ironically, I think the construct of snobbery, enacted by people like me, with power and privilege, toward those who look to exclude people who don't look like them, is probably one of the more useful tools.”Below (and above, in audio form) is our conversation on how she built her career, the media landscape, and the actual definition of natural wine—if there can be one.

Alicia: Hi, Layla—thank you so much for coming on with me today.

Layla: Thank you for having me. I'm excited to be in your very famous newsletter. Alicia: Oh, God. So we’ve known each other—I guess for like a few years now. We've both edited and written for each other at different—well, you always at Wine Enthusiast, but we’ve worked together at Edible [Manhattan], too, and we have organized, along with Emily Stephenson, the Food Writers’ Workshop. And also, I made your wedding cake. So we know each other and I just think it’s important to have that disclosure upfront.I'm gonna ask you to give me a little bit more background on your food writing career and how you ended up at Wine Enthusiast, but for starters, can you give us like a little bit of a bio for you?

Layla: So I grew up in the Boston area, I got into journalism, largely because my dad worked in media. Both my parents are writers, you know; it was predetermined that I'd be a writer in some sense. My dad worked in b2b publishing my whole life. He retired a couple years ago, but he was in it for most of that time. And I believe plastics, before it was a thing. So I used to go to his office, and see how it worked. And I think it always really appealed to me that not only was there the writing side, but there was this design side and there was this kind of organizational, administrative managerial side that spoke deeply to my soul. So I went to journalism school at UCONN and it was a very newspaper-oriented, very kind of like, “you're all going to get jobs at your local newspapers and come town hall meetings” kind of program, which is really helpful background, and I did in fact get a job at a local newspaper right out of college copyediting.

From there, I moved to New York to work in magazines. I loved the format of magazines, and you know, I think I thought it was going to be very glamorous and very cool like a lot of people do, I'm sure. So I got a job at a publishing company that does all in-flight magazines, and I was there for about four years and I worked my way up. Around 2011, I started getting very into food personally and decided that I wanted to get into food writing—at a time when a lot of people were deciding they wanted to get into food writing. And so I quit that job. I went freelance. I was freelance for a little under a year; I very quickly realized that it was not for me, that I still like doing all of these other tasks of being an editor and that I am not great at nor do I particularly enjoy marketing myself.

I got a job at Fine Cooking, which was really kind of like a crash course and cooking technique as well and I was there again for about four years. They started having a lot of layoffs—not Fine Cooking specifically but the publisher. And with that came this extreme caution in what we were publishing that everything had to kind of appeal to our core readership and be fairly conservative. That's when I started looking for other jobs. And, you know, when Wine Enthusiast came along—I've always been interested in wine, but it really was sort of a fit in that I would get to keep learning about this kind of new to me thing. They wanted someone who knew how to make print magazines. And you know, it's a very lifestyle-oriented magazine, so the fact that I had this food and travel background really kind of worke...