Wall Street Journal wine columnists John Brecher and Dorothy Gaiter are leaving the paper after their 579th column, they announced in a footnote at the end of their Christmas Day piece.

The husband and wife team spent the last 12 years at the Journal, and while the WSJ doesn’t plan to end its wine coverage (so says Vinography), the two must have pulled a fairly decent salary and that kind of thing just doesn’t fly in journalism anymore.

Sadly, wine journalism, like arts criticism and movie reviews, is ripe for being decimated by the Internet. After all, a bottle of wine tastes the same no matter where you are, and there are plenty of people willing to drink wine and write about it for cheap or free.

The New York Times employs a wine critic, Eric Asimov, but other papers—like the Washington Post— use freelancers.

We hope Brecher and Gaiter have good things in store—at the very least, there’s probably a book or two in them—but aren’t surprised that this happened; just another casualty. We raise a glass in your honor.

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