Thursday, August 21 2008

The Wine Spectator's New Clothes

I wonder if that's an honest definition?

My mama always said, 'If you can't say anything nice, come sit by me'. No, wait: I think that was Dorothy Parker. In any case, I've had very little nice to say about the Wine Speculator magazine over the years. In the commercial industry they're often colloquially referred to as 'The Wine Dictator', or worse, and are lumped in with absolutist critics like Robert Parker.

The trouble stems from the fact that WS (and Parker) derive significant income from the positive reviews they give to wines. While Parker reviews wines he has (undisclosed) financial interests in, WS reviews wine from companies spending tens of thousands of dollars on advertising in their magazine. They maintain that they're impartial, but only the most trusting folks buy their protestations of high-minded fairness. So why would a publication supposedly providing objective reviews of a consumer product be so reviled by a segment of the wine cognoscenti?

My own saying is that every 'why' question can be answered with the single word, 'money'. While it's not the magnificent smorgasbord of brown-bags of cash that it was in the go-go 80's, there's still plenty of dough to be made from eager marketing departments and easily lead saps who read your fish-wrap. Mere avarice doesn't provide the whole answer though: it also comes from imperialism. Parker and WS colonised the world of wine with their specious, stupid 100 point scale and their desire for nothing but jam-and-alcohol packed beverages. Anyone who dared to cross them by making elegant, structured or lyrical wines could look forward to one a dreaded sub-85 point scores, which would lead immediately to a loss of sales and market share.

Unfortunately their scheme of controlling wine style worked, partly because consumers were hungry for any kind of wine advice in a confusing and complex world of grapes, terroirs and style, and partly by the participatory collusion of wine makers and marketers. Kissing up to the big boys and jamming up your Oaky Vineyards Fruitbomb Red could get you the mightily coveted 95 point rating, instantly guaranteeing you cult status and the ability to put a zero on the end of your retail price.

But it turns out their malfeasance isn't limited to just reviews of wines themselves. They also take cash for completely spurious reviews of restaurant wine lists. Robin Goldstein, an American journalist who wrote The Wine Trials, decided to find out what it took for a restaurant to get a Wine Spectator Award of Excellence for their wine list. So he submitted the list from his restaurant, Osteria L’Intrepido di Milano, a nice little place in Italy, to the Wine Spectator review panel, along with $250. The place has an amusing, if slightly clunky menu, pretty big wine list with some odd choices, but pretty soon he had his answer: Excellence!

The problem is, there's no such restaurant, and a significant portion of the wines on the fictitious list were very poorly reviewed by none other than WS itself. According to Goldstein's web page:

. . . Osteria L’Intrepido’s high-priced “reserve wine list” was largely chosen from among some of the lowest-scoring Italian wines in Wine Spectator over the past few decades.

While it’s interesting that the reserve list would receive such seemingly little scrutiny, the central point is that the wine cellar doesn’t actually exist. And while Osteria L’Intrepido may be the first to win an Award of Excellence for an imaginary restaurant, it’s unlikely that it was the first submission that didn’t accurately reflect the contents of a restaurant’s wine cellar.

I'm shocked, shocked I tell you, to find out that the most important part of the story from the WS point of view was the $250 fee he submitted, and not the accuracy (or even the veracity) of the wine list. Worse, check out some of the reviews they gave to wines on his list:

AMARONE CLASSICO “LA FABRISERIA” 1998 (Veneto) Tedeschi 185,00 €
Wine Spectator rating: 60 points. “…Unacceptable. Sweet and cloying. Smells like bug spray…”

BARBARESCO ASIJ 1985 (Piemonte) Ceretto 135,00 €
Wine Spectator rating: 64 points. “…Earthy, swampy, gamy, harsh and tannic…”

CABERNET SAUVIGNON “I FOSSARETTI” 1995 (Piemonte) Poderi Bertelli 120,00 €
Wine Spectator rating: 58 points. “Something wrong here. Of four samples provided, two were dark in color, but tasted metallic and odd…”

Mmm, that's good bug spray!

Award of Excellence indeed. There's no spin or explanation for 'bug spray', 'swampy', and 'something wrong' in wines costing over 100 Euros a bottle--I mean seriously, over $350 CAD for bug spray?

This reminds me of working in restaurants Vancouver in the 80's. I did a stint as sommelier at what was pretty much the most prestigious restaurant in the city at the time. It had a fabulous wine list, and the owner talked about his 'cellar' in hushed and glowing terms. Trouble is, like the owner's character, the the cellar and the list were largely fictional. He had six cases of mixed bottles down in the furnace room (at over 30C/90F) and a couple of cases over-chilled in a reach-in fridge in the bar. When a customer requested a bottle from the reserve list he ran out the back and drove to the local liquor store and bought it to order, and sometimes begged friends and other restaurants for the most precious bottles.

What's the moral of this whole story? I dunno if there is one, but if I was trying to extract some wisdom, I'd have to say that it's best to trust your own judgement. If you like a wine, then it's a good one, no matter what some critic or magazine says. And if you don't like a wine, then no 100-point rating will make it taste better.

It might just be best to make your own wine, and be the judge, the critic and the final arbiter of taste in your domain. In fact, I'm going to take my own advice, and borrow some crayons and make myself an Award of Excellence, and put it in a place of honour.

posted by Tim at 08:05PM

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