The column "Wine Talk" was started in 1972, written between news assignments that would range from coverage of building fires to the U.N. Security Council.
[1] The writing of Prial was intended to illuminate rather than obfuscate with that “peculiar subgenre of the English language” which the writer termed “winespeak”.
Prial stated that a person “should not have to be a budding enologist to enjoy reading about wine.”[3] Believing that what is in the bottle is much more important than what is on the wine label, Prial observed that "Shorn of their carefully constructed mystiques, their beautiful labels and clever marketing, many expensive wines are really not that much superior to their less expensive rivals.
He was inducted into the Wine Media Guild hall of fame in 2007,[6] and accepted a membership in the Légion d’Honneur from the French government.
[2] Prial died on November 6, 2012, in West Orange, New Jersey, at 82 years old, due to complications of prostate cancer.