The wine industry needs help. Gary Vaynerchuk needs attention.

And so, on Monday, the rise-and-grind media mogul, who ascended to D-list Web 2.0 celebrity in the Aughts by reviewing wines at his family liquor store on YouTube, then parlayed that into a lucrative agency business, took to LinkedIn to declare “The Wine Business Needs to Wake Up.” Part manifesto, part polemic, part lead magnet, the document is tempting to disregard entirely as the ramblings of a blowhard. Because “Gary Vee” is a blowhard. He’s a smarmy, spittle-flecked preacher of platform-based prosperity gospel who conflates luck with skill for the edification of slack-jawed sweatpants men on the other side of a million screens. Don’t forget it was his agency that steered Anheuser-Busch InBev into a bunch of dead-on-arrival NFT projects a couple years ago. Being in the right place at the right time doesn’t mean you can’t be wrong.

Vaynerchuk is a marketer, and as always, he’s talking his book. But he does know from wine, and has developed a discounting brokerage sideline, Wine Texts, to keep a foot in the world from whence he came. His screed is grating and unremarkable. It’s mostly just negging, really. But [grits teeth] there’s a kernel of truth to it. Because of this, and Vaynerchuk’s regrettable influence over the regrettably MBA-brainéd, I think it’s worth evaluating his claims a little more closely.