The mission came through, as it always does, in the fog.
I’ve been on this river a long time. Long enough to remember when the three-tier system made a kind of sense — when the distributor felt like a partner, when the rep walking your route knew your customers by name. Knew which sommelier was quietly building an Italian list and which retailer would gamble on an Etna Rosso nobody had heard of yet. Selling wine was inseparable from loving it. The rep knew the producer, the place, the reason it mattered.
That world didn’t just change. It was hollowed out, quietly, with an acronym.
A few years before Covid, the nation’s largest distributors scrapped the commission model — the one where you earned more by selling more, where every bottle you moved was money in your pocket, where the whole book mattered because you had skin in all of it. They replaced it with something called PFP. Pay for Performance. Which is to say: pay for the people who gave the orders, not the people who did the work.
Supplier-funded bonuses flowed upward while the rep who actually moved product went home to a roommate situation, wondering why passion didn’t cover rent. Base salaries required roommates; bonuses were controlled by management discretion. Reps learned to cherry-pick the highest-paying goals while the obscure wines — the small Barolo producer without a marketing budget, the Etna Rosso that needed a story told — gathered dust.
Nobody was telling stories anymore. The incentive was gone.
The incentive money didn’t disappear. It climbed the ladder — to directors, vice presidents, senior management. Executives who hadn’t sold a bottle in years collected supplier-funded bonuses while the people who knew the wines were turned into errand boys for grocery clerks.
That’s not disruption. That’s extraction.
II. Kilgore
Then Kilgore arrived.
He came in loud and certain, genuinely enthusiastic. He loved the machinery. He loved the program. He had no idea what was burning.
KILGORE: You smell that? Allocated Cabernet, son. Nothing else smells like that. We carpet-bombed the market — eighteen months of priority placement, supplier-funded incentives. Walked the territory afterward. Couldn’t find one new wine drinker. Not one. But the quarter? Smelled like victory.
He sent the steak back.
KILGORE: I want my meat rare. Rare but not cold.
Outside, a generation of drinkers was drifting away — toward hard seltzer, cannabis, sobriety, anything that didn’t smell like a supplier dinner or cost three digits. Public health data once dismissed became harder to ignore. Tariffs landed on a market already heavy with inventory, too many cases chasing too few customers who cared.
KILGORE: Fucking savages.
He climbed back into the helicopter. The river went quiet. Somewhere upriver, Kurtz was waiting.
III. The Extraction Machine
The distribution system was supposed to be a channel — goods moving from producer to market, value created at each stage, relationships built over time. The rep who knew his accounts, championed the small producer, educated the sommelier — that rep was what kept the river flowing.
When PFP replaced judgment with target-chasing funded by large suppliers, the river began to silt up.
Institutional knowledge walked out the door. The sales force that helped build the Italian wine market in America — that introduced Brunello and Barolo and Barbera to a generation — was converted into a precarious gig economy. What replaced it was a management class optimizing for the quarter while the foundation rotted.
RNDC wobbling. Breakthru shedding ballast. The Super Giant behemoths staying afloat by shedding people — the ones who knew things, who cared.
What remains is a management class and a fog.
IV. The Compound
Kurtz was not insane. That’s the important thing. His methods were rational — optimized for a world that no longer exists.
The $250 Barolo. Napa Cabernet priced like a mortgage payment. Allocations, points, collector positioning — a system of crystalline internal logic that forgot to ask who could still afford to buy into it, or why younger drinkers were routing around it entirely.
When Willard finally arrives — when the last blogger without a financial stake in the official story comes upriver — Kurtz has a speech ready.
KURTZ: You have no right to call me a murderer. You have a right to kill me. But you have no right to judge me.
The monologue isn’t mad. That’s why it’s dangerous. He talks about horror. About the genius of acting without judgment, without feeling. He remembers believing in the mission — the channel designed to move culture as well as product. And then he saw what happened to it. The arms in a pile.
Commission reps who loved wine. Small producers who couldn’t buy their way into PFP. Bloggers who couldn’t make the economics work. Sommeliers who got handed a closing manager's duties and watched their education go dormant.
KURTZ: It’s judgment that defeats us.
That’s the line.
PFP eliminated judgment. The rep’s judgment about which wine deserved attention. The buyer’s cultivated judgment about what merited shelf space. Meanwhile, the consumer was left out of the equation.
The wine industrial complex made friends with horror. Brought in SAP and ERP and called it optimization. And now it stands in the fog, wondering why nobody is coming upriver anymore.
V. The Last Blogger
I have no bill to collect. That’s the whole of it.
I spent decades on this river — as a rep, as a director, as someone who believed the system could carry culture as well as product. I left in 2018, early enough to watch clearly from the bank.
The mission of the last blogger is not termination. It’s witness.
Most people who were watching found it economically nonviable to keep watching. They pivoted to Instagram, were absorbed by brands, went quiet. Honest wine writing was always thin economics; in a collapsing market, thinner still.
But here’s what Kurtz doesn’t understand: the absence of a bill to collect is not weakness. It’s what makes judgment possible.
The errand boy sent by grocery clerks has no judgment — he’s there to collect. The blogger with no supplier dinner, no press trip, no allocation to protect — Lord, tell me, he’s not the only one left who can see the banks?
The last wine blogger isn’t standing in triumph. He’s standing the way you stand when the fog hasn’t lifted but you know the current. Long enough to have watched Kilgore’s helicopter disappear. Long enough to have heard Kurtz’s monologue in conference rooms and trade publications, always the same argument in different words: you have no right to judge us. Shareholder optimization. On and on.
I have been back there. I know that world doesn’t exist anymore. The river that carried Italian wine culture into America — that introduced Brunello and Barolo to a generation, that gave the passionate and knowledgeable a way to make a living — has been dammed, diverted, strip-mined for coins.
Someday this war is gonna end.
