William drinks nattier wine than I thought!
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First post in 6 months and this is the best you can come up with?
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C’mon Donald, you’re not interested in a resonable debate. You never engaged in a debate.
But let’s try it then: Let’s forget all the other things you critizied before and just take your last argument and debate it. William Kelly has a bias, a preffered style of wine (you call it the Burgundian style). You think that is wrong. Could you elaborate why that is wrong?
My reasoning why your opinion is wrong: As 9 out of 10 wine drinkers have clear style preferences, the reviews of a critic without style preference have little value for most wine drinkers as the consumer needs to decipher the tasting notes to find out if the wine fits their style preference or not and often the notes are not clear enough to convey that (especially as everybody uses different descriptors). So in my book, the best critics out there are the critics with a bias, a style preference.
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A retailer is not happy with the reviews and scores of a critic to several Champagne he sells? Is that the issue here?
D. Pennet: if you are not happy with the scores for certain wines then use the ones from others. This works. Suckling posts a high score for almost anything. Most wines get a high score from at least one critic, panel etc.
You mentioned that you are happy with Vinous and Eichelmann i.e. Fine. So what? Enough promotion for the Champagne you sell. William Kelly must not be an advertising locomotive for your business too.
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Maybe Lenny is actually Donalds burner account!..
The attempt at criticism in the OP is incredibly thin, its substance so sheer as to be vacuous. Reflects inclination toward Burgundian influences might be the start of something to discuss and explain but there’s nothing cogent that follows. A cheap shot perhaps but I think it’s a mistake to take it seriously.
As an aside, if WK’s Champagne reviews are as helpful as his Burgundy reviews then I’ll be sure to consult them as I have been with Galloni’s Champagne comments.
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There was a time in living memory that trusted merchants built relationships with trusted customers without any reference whatever to journalism. It may in some cases have led to complacency but there were many huge advantages on both sides.
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I do believe that at long last we have found the Champagne equivalent of Bill Klapp! Donald is certainly generating lots of replies. Just wish I understood the oregano swordfish reference…
It’s a story that validates how wronged Donald has been by critics of all stripes, which of course has nothing to do with William.
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Thanks, I forgot about that post. Now I am sure that Donald is the burner for Bill Klapp given the Italian fish reference!
Absolutely no bloody way. Klapp was funny, thought provoking, articulate and pulled no punches. Like Pennet, he could be a complete pain, but unlike him, if he had an agenda it had had nothing to do with his pocket book. Pennet is so nakedly needy, both emotionally and financially.
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Donald,
First, I want to start by saying that I have enjoyed some of the wines I’ve tried on your recommendation, including Domaine de Tuiliers, though I disagreed somewhat with the spectacularly high rating you provided the 2019 Acacia. I appreciate many of your contributions in the Champagne thread.
Next, I’d like to say that I have not appreciated a number of what seem like self-interested takedowns, or kind of personal attacks on palates when folks disagree with your position. We’ve lost a long-time contributor to Wineberserkers who was very active on the Champagne thread because of some unnecessary personal comments from you. Do I think the individual should have had more fortitude and stuck around? Yes. Can your poorly veiled personal attacks wear on folks? Also yes.
The William Kelley vendetta, along with the gross generalizations and demeaning comments, makes you come across at times like a sore and petulant child. Spiteful and maybe a bit jealous. Because of its frequency and consistency, this post can’t really be read as a desire for an open discussion. It’s just an opinion piece: These are my favorite critics and here’s why, and I think William Kelley is a twat.
We get it. Spare us. I read plenty of Vinous and Advocate champagne reviews. Even Wine Spectator, Decanter, and sometimes, god forbid, James Suckling. Sometimes I agree with one critic and not another. Sometimes on a separate wine I agree with the other critic, and not another. Some of the critics you’ve mentioned that you like, I think write poor notes, often with literally no flavor descriptors, or with descriptors so out there I cannot reasonably believe we’re tasting the same thing, even if we end up at the same overall assessment of quality.
But no one thinks you’re on here trying to find the right critic for you. And at this point no one is foolish enough to believe you’re trying to help them, sans bias, find the right critic for their palate.
Chill, pop a bottle, let us know if it’s one you carry or not, then give your honest assessment. I assure you that’s more valuable than whatever this was intended to be.
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DP is missing. Anybody checked to see if Chat-GPT is down?
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I’m starting to think this thread would need some moderationfor both sides as some of the comments starts to be even more off than what Donald was capable of, with or without the GTP
True, but at least we have something like the old Klapp days. Like having a low rent Don Rickles back,
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I do not think we should worry too much for WK. He is enjoying the comments by the OP.
He is, like I said In the thread *** [Wlliam Kelley is the worthy real success or Robert Parker] **** :
A Zhao warrior…donned his braided hat;…Within one thousand miles and none can halt, …
It is wrong to consistently bash Willaim Kelley, and one has to applaud him for participating in discussion.
Over the past two months, a growing sense of frustration has permeated our customer base. Customers who were once able to afford a wide range of wines now find themselves priced out of the market, and their complaints have become more pronounced. Efforts to encourage them to explore alternative options have yielded limited success.
One noteworthy incident involved a customer who, after a 15-minute discussion with me, arrived at a significant realization: perhaps I am not the ideal person to address their concerns. Instead, he proposed that it should be the producers, as well as wine critics, who should hear these grievances. He even expressed a willingness to have his concerns recorded and shared with both wine critics and producers. This pivotal moment sparked an innovative idea.
With the guidance of someone well-versed in how such hotlines operate, we have crafted a concept. It entails empowering consumers to directly communicate their complaints or compliments not only to the producers but also to wine critics, bypassing the intermediary. Furthermore, it allows producers and wine critics to provide explanations for the frequent price increases.
In light of this innovative approach, I would like to reach out to William Kelley and inquire whether such an idea would be of interest. Or could I record these conversations and pass them on, it would make my life considerably easier and less frustrating.
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“Hello, dear wine critic. How are you? I wonder if you are interested to hear complaints directly from these completely random people?”
“It is wrong to blame William Kelley for all things I find difficult with selling Champagne. Perhaps he and he alone will agree to answer for all the reasons my customers find prices to high.”
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There is a real question about wine pricing today, but for me it is a lot more complex than “wines have become unaffordable”. In reality, even a 20 EUR bottle is unaffordable to most people in the world, so what we are really saying is that “wines have increased in price relative to how they used to be priced to an extent that is now uncomfortable for the reasonably affluent Western European middle classes”. Put like this, it is harder to feel quite so much moral outrage.
To me, while there are some wines today that are far too expensive, there are plenty that are too cheap. The legacy of the agrochemical revolution of the second half of the 20th century was a lot of cheap food and also wine; but this came at the expense of quality. The question is, do you want excellence or are you happy with a compromise? In many regions, consumers prefer the latter, but for whatever reason, they are willing to pay for excellence in Champagne and Burgundy. Let’s pencil out the costs of making a wine more or less without compromise, just in terms of labor and materials, for a vineyard planted at 10,000 vines per hectare in the Côte d’Or:
| 5250 bottles per hectare @ 40 hl/ha | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| unit | cost EUR | per hectare | per bottle | |
| manual work (hours) | 1000 | 16 | 16000 | 3.05 |
| harvesting (hours) | 175 | 11.52 | 2016 | 0.38 |
| barrels (used) | 17.5 | 400 | 7000 | 1.33 |
| corks (best qualiy) | 5250 | 1.5 | 7875 | 1.50 |
| glass per bottle | 5250 | 1 | 5250 | 1.00 |
| treatments | 12 | 75 | 900 | 0.17 |
| tractor work (hours) | 200 | 50 | 10000 | 1.90 |
| labels | 5250 | 0.5 | 2625 | 0.50 |
| capsules | 5250 | 0.3 | 1575 | 0.30 |
| 10.14 | ||||
| plus taxes | 12.68 |
Here I’ve assumed that you can pay your harvesters the minimum wage; that you use organic treatments but just copper and sulfur, none of the expensive essential oils etc that can partially replace copper; and no new oak.
I also haven’t accounted for the costs of any materiel, premises, energy costs, full time salaried employees, the cost of servicing any loans, the cost of tying up capital in wine in élevage (for 18 months if you want two winters on the lees). I certainly haven’t taken into account the land values (3 million per hectare for Meursault village, for example) or the cost of sharecropping agreements. And nor do I factor in the opportunity cost of not selling the fruit on the bulk market, which is riding very high at the moment.
If you add on a profit margin for the producer at let’s say the same margin for which you run your business, and then the 100+% markup by the importer/retailer, it is very difficult to put the bottle on the shelf or the table for less than 50 EUR. And you’ll understand that producers in the Côte d’Or who actually put the same effort into their regional and village level wines as they do their higher appellations are actually subsidizing those lower appellations with their top wines. What’s more, of that 50 EUR, the largest single share will be the margin of the importer/retailer.
Which of the lines above would you prefer to compromise on? It’s easy to reduce any of those costs. But those also reduce the quality of the wine, and the quality of the environment we inhabit in many cases. Or the quality of life of the producers. Should wine growers really be deprived of a level of quality of life similar to that of their clients?
We devote a lot of time to criticizing producers, but no one stops to ask if it’s really reasonable to put coefficients of 100+% on 80+ EUR bottles? Which isn’t to devalorize the role of distribution at all, which has very big costs too, and plays a very important part. But as a merchant, if you object to a producer asking for 10 more EUR per bottle, how do you justify then asking the consumer for 15 EUR more on top of that? Are you having to do any more work? Why don’t we ask these questions when we talk about wine prices?
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