This would be like buying Goodfellow, stripping off the label, putting Watkins Wine on the label. Or just reselling the Goodfellow without a retailer’s license. In Texas both would be a crime, the first also subject to civil liability. Totally different than buying videos, watching them, posting a youtube video criticizing the video (or praising it) from which you profited from view-driven revenue and ads on your youtube videos.
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I do not think that is correct. There are several wineries that have not sent samples to the WS.
Jeff I think it’s pretty clear that WS was referring to the five listed in its article. I don’t doubt several other wineries refrain from sending samples to WS.
I think it speaks to the fact that WS is far less important than it used to be, and does not move markets in the same way.
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'btw-most of us assume a book reviewer reads the whole book, and a movie reviewer watches the whole show, but a palate blind tasting 100-200 wines is tasting 1oz for 4-8 minutes"
Per WS:
How are Wine Spectator tastings set up?
- All official Wine Spectator tastings are held in private rooms, under optimum conditions.
- Our tasting coordinators organize the wines into flights by varietal, appellation or region.
- Each flight may consist of 20 to 30 wines, and no more than two flights are tasted by a taster each day.
- Bottles are coded and bagged, and all capsules and corks are removed. Other necessary efforts are made to conceal the wines’ identity from the tasters.
- The tasters are told only the general type of wine (varietal and/or region) and the vintage. No information about the winery or the price of the wine is available to the tasters while they are tasting.
How are the wines tasted?
- Each tasting begins with a previously rated wine, which is tasted non-blind as a reference point.
- Other previously rated wines are included among the blind wines to ensure consistency.
- The tasters enter notes and ratings directly into our database prior to removal of the bags.
- While entering their reviews, the tasters only see the code that matches that of the bag covering the wine they are tasting, and blank spaces for their note, score and drink recommendation.
- Ratings are based on potential quality: how good the wines will be when they are at their peak. For ageable wines, we suggest a year or range of years to start drinking the wine.
- Additional comments may be added to a tasting note after the identity of the wine has been revealed, but the score is never changed.
- Price is not taken into account in scoring, though the notes may be edited to include comments about price and value after the scores are determined.
How many times is a wine tasted?
- All wines that taste corky or show other major flaws are blind-tasted again from new bottles.
- Wines that score highly are also frequently tasted again from new bottles, in order to confirm our impressions.
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Yes, I know. I was answering your initial question and adding more info.
In an ideological world you could be right.
But in the real world, outcomes often come down to which business is more willing to expend resources to win.
My reputation is among the most valuable assets I have, and I am highly motivated to defend it if I think it’s being abused.
Winery media doesn’t exist without wineries any more than youtube video reviewers don’t exist without videos. Starting an expensive public pissing match in court with a winery probably isn’t really high on the media company’s very busy to do list.
Nor is it, in any way, in the best financial interests of any wine media to get wineries viewing you as antagonists. Robert Parker’s review of Faively’s wine that caused the 1990s lawsuit was a comment by him on American storage, but the Burgundian’s as a whole reacted very poorly to a simple mis-communication. There’s no fucking around in the wine business. It’s fun, but it’s also VERY hard work, and if you want to cowboy up on your rights as a reviewer you’re going to raise hackles very quickly. Wineries recognize the strong positive input that good critical review can provide, and most are willing to be a bit unhappy if the review they get isn’t magical, but I don’t see an acceptance of having a review forced down your throat. That will lead to a regular negative conversation about the reviewer, because wineries do have voices too and are perfectly capable of reviewing reviewers. Bad business for everyone, but my reputation is my reputation and I will put a lot into protecting it.
I just met with the Oregon reviewer for the Wine Spectator at the winery 3 weeks ago. We tasted and talked for about 90 minutes, working through a range of wines that would introduce him(Tim Fish) to our wines and what our goals are in making wines. It was an appreciated compliment that he reached out to me to come and visit. And talking and tasting with him was an excellent experience. We don’t have anything that is currently reviewable, due to 2020, and they only review wines submitted through their process. While Tim hoped that we would submit in the future, I learned a long time ago that our wines do not fare well in blind tastings, whether 6 wines, 20-30 wines, or 100+. The things that stand out in comparative blind tastings are the opposite of what I am looking for. And there are about a million wineries happy to oblige the consumer looking for the aspects that do stand out in blind tastings.
If that sounds extreme, consider that I no longer take part in technical tastings with my peer group either. Flighted tastings are, in my opinion, inherently biased away from what I actually love about wine, it’s diversity. So the only way I taste to learn is by adding a bottle to my cellar and drinking it by itself or by going to the cellar of the producer and tasting with them.
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Marcus,
If some magazine bought a bottle of your wine in a store and reviewed it positively, you’d still threaten legal action? Or only if it was bad?
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Less than a 100 wines. Still a bad way to taste.
At a technical tasting for wine professionals I attended annually in 2003-2005, we tasted 5 flights of 6 wines. Half the room tasted in order of 1-6, on each flight. The other half of the room tasted in order from wine 6-1. The opinions of the room on wines 1-2 and 5-6 differed incredibly, far too much for me to be comfortable with a published idea of overall quality.
That was set in stone for me at a blind tasting in 2008, where one of the biggest/fruitiest wines I ever produced looked medium bodied because the wines on either side were 15%+ in alcohol and massive. And in the next flight where one of the Pinot Noirs wines had noticeable RS and absolutely wrecked the perception of the flight(a Chilean PN at 15.2% and 8g/l of RS).
Everyone gets their own opinion, this is just mine.
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The sad thing about our system is that anyone can sue anybody over anything. However, you would lose because one of the great things about our system is First Amendment rights.
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I honestly wonder if anyone buying First Growths reads Wine Spectator, or, conversely, if any Wine Spectator reader would consider buying a First Growth after reading how (presumably, given the likely review) amazing it is, then seeing its price, etc. I don’t see the two as complimentary audiences, at all. Were they ever?
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As a lawyer, I’ll refrain from responding to the meat of your response related to legal action against a wine publication who writes and adverse review without your permission. I’m all too familiar with the aspects of litigation unrelated to who has the law right, and where business sense, likely legal outcome, resource disparity, and principle all intersect.
What I do want to address is your comment about the potential adverse effects of a broad comparative blind tasting, as I have seen that play out first hand. In a group of cali fans tasting dozens of 2007 cabs in like 2010 or 2011, the blind tasting winner was a Ghost Block, which had received something like an 89 or 90. It won because it stood out, not because it was among the “better” wines. Instead of the plush fruit and high glycerin of bottle after bottle after bottle, it was more medium bodied, a bit rough, and with tannings outpacing the fruit. I did not score it highly at all, but there was no denying that the tasting was almost binary. I I I I I I I I I O I I I I I I I with the O being the Ghost Block. It stopped you down.
This discussion further aside, I got the following text from my mom last night, Marcus:
“Drinking a Goodfellow white. So glad you sent us there!”
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Wine Spectator has distribution in places like high end hotels and such, where I’m sure it will find people who don’t know much about wine but will happily buy and drink that '19 Margaux because of a glowing WS review. Obviously not enough of them to move any markets, but I’m sure it happens.
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I do (or did). I don’t see WS as primarily a magazine for beginners (though many beginners reach for it, as I did). WS is a lifestyle magazine that caters to folks who want the best and are willing to pay for it, and to folks who aspire to be those folks some day (or who just like reading about them).
Yes, there is a contrast between hard core wine geeks and those who are less into all the details, and yes many HCWGs buy 1st Growths (but many don’t), and yes HCWGs don’t read WS, but I don’t think it’s true that ONLY HCWGs buy 1st Growths. Moderate to beginner wine geeks with money to burn and a desire to own and drink “the best” are a large overlap, IMO, between WS readers and 1st Growth buyers.
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T2 was fun, and had a huge budget, so great special effects, but T1 was unprecedented at the time, truly unique, so it gets my nod. Now for another Cameron property, Alien versus Aliens, it’s a much harder pick, because they are different genres, one straight horror, and the other military. Both masterpieces, but I think I’d choose the latter.
On to another tangent, if suing for unsolicited reviews was a real viable option, I think we’d see a bunch more lawsuits. When Jancis Robinson slammed 2003 Pavie, it raised eyebrows, and much internet discourse, but I don’t remember any notion of lawsuits between Robinson/ Perse/ Parker.
And on the original topic, I think WS’s point is that those five wineries used to provide them samples for scoring, but have since ceased doing so. WS can’t otherwise review a wine that isn’t released yet, so those wines can’t be reviewed alongside other Bordeaux. If I read his comments correctly @Jeff_Leve seems to be contradicting the idea that those five wineries provided WS with samples in the recent past, so I don’t know what to believe.
I do think the traditional Bordeaux pre-release tastings in which the first growths refuse to be tasted alongside their appellation peers show great insecurity, but probably make good business sense. Who would pay $1k for a first growth that can’t be consistently differentiated from a good third growth?
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I think yes to your first sentence. I think there are plenty of rich folks who want to have great wines and for which money isn’t really the concern, but who don’t want to buy stuff that might be questioned as not that great. Wine Spectator provides enough info and is a classy publication, and validates with its scores the quality of first growths. If you wanted to have a very shallow bit of Bdx knowledge and pop some big bottles when your hot shit clients or execs come over for dinner, first growths check all the boxes. It’s a defensive buy. No one is going to sneer at a Lafite, even if they’re a wine snob and the opener is not. They might at SQN.
Re your next point, I doubt many folks getting into wine without massive budgets and the need to avoid rich dude faux pas are like oh wow, Lafite has scored a 97 or higher six straight vintages, I guess I should start spending a1/3 of my disposable income on it when $50 Muga wines are relatively near in score.
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[quote=“Brady_Daniels, post:55, topic:297080, full:true”]
A few things. I do not think they previously sent samples, off the top of my head, I am not positive.
Numerous estates do not send bottles for outside tastings. They insist on you tasting at the property. In fact, it is a continuing trend for estates to no longer send bottles for outside tastings. It is not just the First Growths.
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Actually every “review” business that I have experience with works quite similarly to the wine industry. Books, movies, consumer product companies all, in my limited experience, send out lots of free samples to reviewers - either trusted or with wide distribution - to comment on their products. And every industry has the same problems with subjectivity, cozy relationships, implicit agreement about positivity, etc. In this way, the wine industry is just normal.
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100%. The reviewers all say that while the product is free, the company is not paying them and gave them no direction on how to review it. While technically true, a blogger who regularly gives negative reviews won’t be a blogger for much longer. And they make money off of affiliate links.
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my first reaction is “good for them!”
my second reaction is “did they make this decision together? all at once?”
quite an interesting development. no idea whether this achieves a desired result, but if i’m a luxury / in-demand product, i would prefer to control or highly influence the reviews of my products in every instance. any reviewer anywhere is free to purchase the product themselves on the open market and provide their readers with the info they desire.
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