Thanks for the great review, @CFu ! Of the many lessons making wine myself has taught me, the emotions one feels when knowing ones bottles are going to come under critical scrutiny is one of the more ironic, given my day job. But that only heightens the satisfaction when the bottle performs!
I’m also grateful for @Matthew_King for raising the subject of potential conflicts of interests, as this sometimes comes up and I have never really know where to address the question publicly beyond what is already published in TWA.
From my point of view, there is no question that making wine has immeasurably improved my work as a critic, vis a vis with what I was doing when I started out reviewing wines eight years ago. Burgundy is a region that can only be understood intimately, from the ground up, and living each growing season with all its challenges; seeing how different sites, rootstocks and vine genetics perform; observing how different farming practices play out and seeing all the ups and downs; following how my own wines evolve in barrel to better master the art of barrel tasting unfinished wines—all this and much more has transformed the way I work. If I have dared to disrupt the traditional hierarchy of appellations and in some cases producers, it is surely thanks to the additional assurance this total immersion approach to wine criticism has brought me. I hope it also gives me more skin in the game: producers can see if I am doing the work in the vineyards that I praise on the page, or if my practices are incoherent with my discourse; and I see this as a form of accountability to both them and our readers.
From the beginning, my approach has been disclosure. My first vintage of my own production in Burgundy was 2018, and my 2018 Côte d’Or vintage report includes a paragraph about my experiences and a photo of me in a vat of wine. Naturally, I do not review my own wines. And, after a couple of weeks’ excitement at seeing people post photos of my bottles on social media, wisdom has prevailed and I have stopped re-sharing any content that features my labels on Instagram. My passion is really my two domaine parcels, which I own and farm, but I also buy some grapes for now, to explore other appellations and because my own vineyards are both Pinot Noir, so no Chardonnay or Aligoté. How do I handle that in the instance that the fruit source is a producer I review? We discussed this internally at TWA, and agreed to publish a disclosure in the producer note attached to all the reviews for the vintages concerned. In practice, this has so far arrived only once: those of you who have read my reviews of Gilbert Felettig’s wines from 2018 on may have noticed it, as I buy 660 kg of Chambolle fruit from him every year. With my 2022 vintage, you’ll see one more disclosure for another producer. As others have observed, such situations are not unprecedented: Robert Parker was the proprietor of a winery that he didn’t review; Hugh Johnson sat on the board of Château Latour; Jasper Morris owns a vineyard in the Beaune premiers crus farmed by Jean-Yves Devevey; Camille Rodier, one of the greatest French authors on Burgundy in the early 20th century, was even proprietor of Domaine des Lambrays. My approach has always been to consider sunlight the best disinfectant.
In practice, while it’s easy to talk of conflict of interest, no one has ever been able to explain to me exactly how it would play out. Would I be best served by talking up the region as a whole, or by disparaging my competitors? Should I give more generous reviews to my suppliers, or would doing so risk increasing demand for their wines, thus reducing or ending the supply? I have always tended to think that my reputation and credibility with our readers is worth much more than a barrel or two of wine, especially as it is so easy for anyone to put me to the test by simply opening a bottle.