Thanks William. I’m naturally skeptical and I admit I always wonder who is bought and paid for.
Without intending to pick a fight, I don’t think too many wineries are as worried about negative reviews as they used to be either.
I can’t speak to other wineries, but no critic has ever inclined in any way that my reviews could be affected by anything other than how the wines show when tasted. It has been helpful to taste with them, as it gives me the opportunity to choose the tasting order and answer questions. That said, I have never tasted with Josh Raynolds, and he does an exceptional job, in my opinion.
My overall experience is that most reviewers work hard and do the best job they can with a finite amount of time in the day and an ever growing population of wineries and wine regions. For premier growing regions, I would guess that the level of knowledge and interaction of critics is exceptional. Your own posts here more than prove that.
For backwaters like the Willamette Valley, every critic I have ever tasted with has done an excellent job with the wines. But the in depth knowledge has always been a work in progress. Where we have continuity with a critic, I have few complaints. But transition has not always been smooth, and somehow that isn’t what makes it into the reviews.
Fortunately, bad reviews of a good wine don’t really slow down sales these days. And great reviews don’t open the floodgates. Which is great, because it means that critical reviews are back to being a helpful reference work for interested people, rather than a marketing tool to create a feeding frenzy.
A winery owner told me when I was starting that: “Submit all wines you make. If you get a bad score - nobody knows because nobody reads them. If you get a good score - use it in your marketing. Can’t lose”.
Seems about right.
The major flaw in your logic, is that it’s all worthless if there is no integrity.
Critical review is a useful tool for wineries. From small underfunded ones like mine up to the behemoths. It’s a useful tool for the consumer. And it’s a profession, and pays rent(hopefully) for the critic.
But if the consumer loses trust in the critic, then the whole thing goes down the drain.
So while the opportunity for abuse is there, it’s not worth risking the whole apple cart for a payoff(even a really lucrative one). It’s really not worth it for wineries with great vineyard sites, as they should be making great wines and doing all right anyway. It’s not worth it to the critic to boost a mediocre winery.
Not to say that there has never been an instance where someone broke the trust. But a situation such as happened with Rudy Kurwanian, if it’s once the fine wine market will bear it. If there are 1000 Rudy K.s, there will be no fine wine market. The same logic applies to corruption in critical reviews.
Pretty much.
I don’t submit everything anymore because I make a rude number of cuvees for a small winery and most appointments with a critic are scheduled at 60-90 minutes.
Not at all worthless, but suspect and not entirely trustworthy. I understand that critics need producers and vice versa. It’s like that in any consumer-driven area of commerce, whether it be selling cars, wine, handbags or anything else.
Speaking of Rudy, I thought this was kind of instructive as to the issues with the wine biz:
I at least appreciate the fact that Hemming is remarkably straightforward and admits that he’s not really a journalist. But claiming you write for a wine publication and then out-and-out saying you won’t report something that happened of great interest to the community you ostensibly serve because the subject of that hypothetical article asked you to is eye-poppingly antithetical to the entire idea of criticism, journalism, or just plain ethics, to say nothing of admitting that you acquiesced because you didn’t want to damage your own relationships in the industry. If you can’t clear this extremely low bar, you should not be writing for a site that is one of the largest half-dozen wine criticism sites on the planet and they should not have you working for them.
In my personal experience, my partner is a journalist. Even in the nominally uncontroversial worlds of culture and fashion that are her main beats, she’s had multiple instances of sources or subjects of pieces she’s written flip out after an interview or profile is published where she had the gall to faithfully reproduce the words of someone who didn’t realize how utterly foolish/arrogant/terrible they’d look when they opened their mouth. She’s had lawsuit threats, dozens of emails and phone calls to her editors insisting she misquoted or lied about them and demanding her pieces be taken down, and countless other intimidation tactics. She has never bowed to that pressure if the facts are straight, which they always are (and she’s got the tapes to prove it). Even so, she left her job at a major fashion magazine last year to return to freelance work because she was uncomfortable with the unabashed pay-for-play system between the brands and the people who write about them which is remarkably similar to the way a lot of wine critics and publications (and a lot of other industries) work that make it impossible to freely speak one’s mind or critique without fear of reprisal from either the companies paying the ad bills or the place you work for that relies on their money to survive.
The article has been posted on Jancis’ website as ‘free for all’ so I assume it’s ok to share it here:
It’s an interesting article, but there are a couple of issues. (Edit-Sean’s article is the one I’m referencing)
One-Ponsot was offering opinions, as opposed to facts. He also stated he was working on publishing them himself. While a “serious” journalist might have gone ahead and scooped him, I would bet that said serious journalist would wind up without access next time regardless of industry.
Two-Laurent Ponsot is a winemaker, and speaking at Sour Grapes he’s there as a celebrity winemaker/owner. Publishing his thoughts are interesting(to a relatively small number of people) but they’re hardly “news”.
That said, his willingness to connect it directly to not wanting to upset the lodging of Laurent in Singapore seems pretty laughable. I’m betting M. Ponsot can afford a hotel room. Or to disturb his friends.
In the end, it’s the consumers desire to participate that matters. It’s too both the critic and the wineries benefit to keep reviews, which I view as different than news, independent.
An article with the headline “the next cult wines” is of no interest for a wine lover. It may be interesting for speculators and managers of wine funds.
William,
I agree that some journalists offer interesting insider info to producers, wines, wine making, “Terroir” and so forth. But only few people read those informations. What matters in the industry and does people interest most is the score. This is what the merchants spread. You can see it right now in the Primeur campaign “Bordeaux 2019”. You get few background information about the Chateaux if any at all. But one can see many hit lists of the top rated wines or wines of the vintage.
That’s certainly true of the top estates of the Côte d’Or. Sure, there are some (or at least two) domaines that I sense consider it lèse magesté if they don’t come out at the top of the report, and I would probably feel the same were I in their shoes. But as you say, the top producers in Burgundy don’t need to be reviewed to sell their wines many times over, and I’m under no illusions about that. Equally, however, I think even the top addresses appreciate the validation of hard work that comes from good reviews from tasters they respect. And they are perhaps more interested than they might readily admit to have a sense of where their wines are situated in a broader regional context—as obviously, no producers taste as widely as I do within Burgundy. Where the reviews begin to have a bigger impact is when you leave Chassagne and go to Santenay, for example: in the less celebrated appellations, taking the same time and attention to visit estates as I do in the important villages can have a big impact, and one sees good producers getting new importers, and in turn, consumers drinking the wines. In places such as the Côte Chalonnaise and Beaujolais it’s even more impactful. I think this has the potential to encourage good practice, especially at a viticultural level, without imposing any particularly idiosyncratic stylistic preferences on the wines. So the positive power of reviews, even in Burgundy, is still quite potent.
I don’t think this makes sense at all, for the reasons that Marcus pointed out. You seem to want there to be something unethical going on.
I mean, what that article outlines is unethical by every accepted tenet of journalism.
What the problem is should probably better be described as “there are precious few actual wine journalism outlets”, because what the majority of them do is not journalism. When you don’t pretend to abide by ethical standards, I guess there is, indeed, nothing unethical going on. Whether you think that matters is up to you.
Would it be ethical to write a story that cast a very negative impression of some people in the business based on someone’s theories rather than facts? Is that journalism?
Reporting what somebody says is not the same as reporting them as fact.
You could also - wait for it - do a Big Boy Journalism and go to those people with Ponsot’s claims and ask for comment.
This is an older post, so things may have changed, but I remember finding it quite interesting.
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Thank you Corey. Illuminating.
I did try to submit to Vinous/Galloni, Jeb Dunnuck and James Suckling, but they all sent out emails basically saying “if we want to review wines from you, we’ll ask you to submit a sample”. Which they haven’t. Dacanter never responded. So far Hawk at Jancis Robinson’s US arm has taken some (and was very responsive), Wine Enthusiast and Wine Spectator, Esther Mobley at SF Chronicle (who even called to do a kind of informal interview) and a few Instagram wine reviewers like Wine1Percent etc. Honestly, the online ones result in more instant sales than anything - it seems like that’s where the future is. The print stuff I’m not so sure will result in anything, so I might concentrate on those that have a good social media presence and skip the rest in the future. Just have to be careful with the “influencers” online that basically see you as a way to support their wine habit/lifestyle. But I’m finding my way still, no idea what’s best.
Yeah, I’ll critique the hell out of wine if I get it free! ![[wow.gif]](/uploads/db3686/original/2X/7/7d450e9830889c8943b674446a21b7254cad657e.gif "wow"){kind=small}
Cadiz Muchada-Léclapart Univers 2018 : 14/20 - 17/7/2021
A great disappointment for this (quite expensive) discovery. Very common in taste, texture and lenght. The vino blanco Navazos-Niepoort (palomino fino not fortified too) is an alternative.
The Equipo Navazos vino blanco is an excellent wine.