and all great art requires great skill. a craft that is honed over time with only a few really standing out at the top. its rigor mirrors that of applied sciences. so from that standpoint, there are standards, benchmarks, etc. This is an age-old online debate, but if you reject that underlying thesis, then the rest is of course irrelevant. anyone is free to take the position that this is all subjective, but there’s too much evidence to the contrary. it’s also a tautology.
the inherent “problem” - if there is one - is the incentive structure of asking to pay for this type of information, in this case wine reviews. the incentives include reviewing the greatest amount of wines possible (to attract the largest subscriber base) which will inevitably conflict with the desires of individual subscribers. on top of that, high scores will always reign supreme as they serve as a strong confirmation bias for existing subscribers - no one wants to be pay to read that the wine they purchased got 88 points. therefore, the business is only going to succeed if you give out a lot of high scores. sure, once in a while you’ll come across a written proviso in the tasting note something like “for the style” etc to subtly indicate the reviewer doesn’t actually like the wine, but that’s rare. and of course, if you keep giving out low scores, you’ll be cut off from tastings, samples, etc., all of which you need to deliver on the first part - review as many wines as possible.
I largely agree with Greg K. If there really is a need for some sort of organized panel of structured and technically informed critics then maybe we need such a thing for restaurants and movies too. While some portion of the wine geek community would like something like that there is no actual need for it.
The practical considerations of some of the things being discussed in this thread are off the charts. Even if winemakers wanted to share all that data, gathering and organizing it is the territory of well funded government research projects.
With all due respect Guillermo, there is no real way to create a “fair” model. First of all, as you see, the type of information one person likes is not what someone else cares about. One person cares about brix and someone else just wants to know if the wine tastes good.
Second, the regions one person cares about are not the regions someone else cares about. I doubt that anyone will make a living writing about wine from the Balkans. If you want to write about Bordeaux or Burgundy, both places are already crowded. So you either specialize, or you taste broadly and that gets into the third problem - there are only so many hours in a day that you can devote to developing an expertise.
Finally, why would anyone pay a significant sum to get opinions from somebody when there are so many opinions offered for free? Even if someone were to come up with a model you deem fair, would you really care about that person’s opinion enough to pay for it? Especially if it didn’t somehow correspond with your own?
James Bryce once said something along the lines of sunlight being the best disinfectant, and with all the various reviewers out there, if someone is being paid for opinions, that will eventually get out and people who care one way or another will make their own choices as to whether or not to trust the critic.
Chris was posting as I was writing but he put it more succinctly.
Diabetics shouldn’t be buying Spätlese but they can buy certain Kabinett, or they can decide to have a small glass of dessert wine. Knowing exact amounts of sugar helps if you have to do an insulin shot after a meal.
Anyway, the point is the information should be available, not the exact reasons why some or others would use it. Granted, diabetics are an extreme case.
I get that knowing the amount of RS helps with insulin dosing, but you were arguing that it was life saving information. That is patently false. Hence, my response.
Greg’s last comment about the difficulty of creating fair models got me thinking in a slightly different direction. Instead of considering a single reviewer/site and their legitimacy, perhaps we should consider the entire market. From that perspective, what we want is a large variety of views, as open as possible, as clear as possible, and as accessible as possible. We want to have the freedom to provide feedback directly to the reviewers, as well as discuss them with reasonable impunity in both public and private forums. We want to have an open historical record of points of view so that we can supplement our very faulty memories with past facts, so we can track how close we compare to a particular reviewer’s palate and opinions. And remember our own.
I’m sure we can come up with other requirements for creating a fair ecosystem for understanding wine. I don’t mean to be tautologous but this sounds a heck of a lot like the current state of things. Hideously imperfect as it is. And compared to previous decades, there are more opinions, more reviews, more feedback mechanisms, and everything is far more accessible. Is this a golden age of wine reviewing and information?
There are problems, and we discuss those all the time. And the openness/dispersion of information means that market pricing imperfections don’t last long.
I can’t think of any reason to subject my publications to this type of ‘purity test’. Should you have the same for your baker, coffee roaster and dry cleaner? Every critic works their tail off, and the tasting never ends. If consumers aren’t confident in the opinion offered, don’t subscribe. I’m frankly shocked though, I always thought this forum didn’t need critics because they got all their information from the board or cellartracker, or the next ‘board darling’ wine just magically appeared in their cellar.
Research shows that part of wine’s dreadful relationship with Millennials is the lack of transparency about what’s in the bottle. I will keep advocating for that transparency. You can keep laughing at me. That’s ok.
But that’s a very different problem than wine critics ability to make a living and work independently of the industry. Why would it ever be critics’ jobs to let the world know how every bottle of wine is made?
Aside from that, I don’t buy the “lack of transparency” being a real problem. That sounds a lot more like an artifact of receiving an earful from some “natural wine” zealot than a real issue. What is it people don’t know about what goes in a bottle of wine that isn’t factory produced after all?
Transparency is one thing, information overload is another.
When consumers mention transparency in the context of wine is usually things like are the stories behind the winemaker, vineyard and region authentic or a manufactured ones by a big brand and are the wines made in a sustainable and non-exploitive manner.
As Greg has pointed out most consumers simply cannot contextualise all of the tech sheet numbers. That’d require that most consumers be extremely knowledgeable in both winemaking, chemistry, agriculture, and many other areas. That’s simply not a realistic proposition to most. Hell, I’d reckon it’s only a small minority of even Berserkers who are able to fully do so (I’ll be the first to admit I’m not in that elite minority. I can understand some, but it’s a far cry from processing all the tech sheet information fully).
Most consumers just want some reassurance that the products they are consuming are of a certain quality, and well and ethically made.
They don’t need to understand all the data points in order to appreciate that they are transparently available. Some will only seek to use and understand a few data points. Others more. Some none. But having them available is reassuring as to the quality of the wine and the accuracy of the review.
Talking about technical data just doesn’t really offer info on the wine. Think Turley is a good example. If I saw 15.6% alcohol and 20% new oak and a TA of 5.8 on a wine I didn’t know, I would run away as if from a burning fire. However, if I read @Ken_Zinns note on a Turley Zinfandel, I can pick up on what he’s laying down.
There are also many examples of Burgundy that have had a LOT of new oak that have very little barrel notes to me as compared to many BDX with “25% new” oak. So unless you know every cooperage and understand grain tightness and all the other stuff winemakers know, this could actually be DISinformation in terms or what you’d smell and taste in the finished product.
And if we come back to Turley, I’ve had tons of their Zins over the last decade, all of which receive generally the same treatment. The wood clearly reacts very differently with each wine, as some show overt notes and many show none at all to me. I think that even to the well informed consumer this could actually be detrimental.
It seems to me there’s a legit discussion over whether winemakers should include info on the label, but why is it the reviewer’s responsibility in your construct?
Also, I go back to my earlier post. The vast, vast majority (nearly all?) of people consuming wine reviews/scores are those reading shelf talkers at the supermarket or large beverage store. The millennials who want “clean” wine are, I’m guessing, not reading detailed tasting notes in a newsletter they pay for (and the ones who do become wine nerds will get past the “clean” thing).
This entire thread is really interesting from a theoretical perspective. To quote The Simpsons, in theory, Communism works, In theory,
The problem is that people ends up reducing a wine to only a handful of figures, and simply using those as the yardstick and focusing just on a handful of figures even if given every single conceivable measurable data point. Oh, let me just focus on the ABV or % of new oak. That’s a far cry from the whole picture. If most Burgundy drinkers were to look at a just the tech sheet for DRC with the producer name left out, I imagine many would balk at the use of 100% new oak and not want to drink it. A wine is more than just the numbers on. I imagine even the most technically minded could not get the full sense of a wine by looking at a tech sheet alone.
I’m not sure I agree that having extra tech sheet information reassures me of the quality and accuracy of any particular wine review. A critic can provide all the tech sheet information in the world, and I may completely disagree with their assessment of a wine. I don’t think those two things are related.
Because the critics’ primary job is to help consumers decide.
Don’t get me wrong, I have an entire thread asking retailers to be more transparent. And producers should be voluntarily more transparent too. But of all three, it is the critic who works supposedly for the consumer.