Are Wine Reviews Worth Reading?

Nearly three years ago I was sent a bottle of wine to review. It was a newly-released Jimmy Watson Trophy winner, which is no guarantee of bottled wine quality. Nevertheless the razamatazz that accompanies the winning wine’s release is such that the wine cannot be ignored. Its publicity to that stage was very generous, the response predictably hysterical.

The wine itself was acceptable. Not bad, but nothing special. In fact, I wrote that although its palate was short and incomplete, it should never have won the trophy in the first place. Mind you, it wasn’t an all-bad review and I gave the wine a solid three stars out of five. I added that the winery concerned had a deservedly high reputation and that if any blame should be laid, it should be at the feet of the judges or those who have wrongly set the Jimmy Watson as the be-all and end-all of Australian wine. I omitted to say that the wine company had bumped up the price of this wine by 50 against their previous word, although their only additional cost was a bit of ribbon they decoratively fastened to each bottle.

I have not seen a favourable review on that wine since, and you can still buy it today, years later, when most Jimmy Watson wines sell out in six months. So what’s the worth of the wine review? If they can be so different, are they actually worth reading?

That’s not an easy question to answer, although I must confess that if I didn’t think my reviews were worth reading, I wouldn’t bother writing them. I expect every other wine critic feels precisely the same way. Whereas I agree many that wine reviews are worth a look at, I think that if a problem exists, it’s in the way the public interprets them.

It is not unusual for a good review to be taken out of all context. Wines that receive blessings abundant in the local rag or glossy can expect to sell out in no time at all. I was once told that a review I wrote about a Leo Buring Chardonnay helped to push several semi-trailer loads into the stores and past the cash registers the following week.

If a good review can make such a positive result, it holds that a bad review can impact to the same magnitude in the opposite direction. As a result, I believe it irresponsible to criticise a wine in print just because it lacks a little or is affected by a minor winemaking fault or two, which could easily be the fault of a poor season and no reflection on the wine company at all.

A couple of bad reviews for an indifferent wine could send a small to medium-sized company to the wall and ruin the livelihoods of several families. It’s not the role of the wine media to do that, which is why you don’t often see mediocre or indifferent reviews in the general press. I’d rather not write anything at all.

As a consequence, wine writers are often criticised for not appearing ‘critical’ enough, but that’s why. Most of us will, however, not waste an instant to prevent someone pulling the wool over the public eye or otherwise blatantly ripping people off.

Wine reviews are usually written to help the reader find his or her way through today’s explosion of wine labels, most of which are acceptable and sound drinks in the very least, but some of which are rather less than their presentation or reputation would suggest.

Wines change while uncorked and within the bottle, and they change even more rapidly once the cork has been pulled. To see what I mean, buy a dozen of young reds and immediately open one bottle and try it. Then open another three hours later and compare it with the wine that has been opened all along. Chalk and cheese, I’ll bet. Then open a bottle on that day each month until the dozen is finished. Research of this nature will clearly illustrate how much a wine changes with time.

Reviews are instantaneous snapshots of someone’s opinion. Standing beside a racetrack, cars fly past at amazing speed. Depending on where you’re located, you may or may not detect a car’s loss of brake pressure, lack of tyre grip or wonky gearbox, any of which may or may not cause it to withdraw on the next lap. You only get a passing glimpse from which to make up your mind on the merits of a situation that may potentially change the very next instant.

Reviewing wine is a bit like that. You don’t have the thirty-seven cameras located all around the track to pick up and focus on the most minute problem or aspect and watch it develop into the incident of the day, unless you open a bottle of every wine every month. With around ten thousand different wines on the Australian market, that’s a lot bottles to uncork!

Capable wine critics are aware of all this. Their experience helps to predict the direction a wine will take and to extrapolate its rate of development. But wine writers are all human and all wine is still natural; not a perfect combination.

Professional reviewers may examine a bottle of wine several times over before putting their views to paper, to accommodate the changes implicate as a wine breathes. It would be irresponsible to send to press an evaluation of a young red wine just uncorked, for instance. In addition to this, wine contributors to magazines with extended lead-times, which may extend up to six months, acknowledge that the wine may be up to twice as old by the time the review goes to press and adapt their views accordingly.

Therefore, I fail to see anything but a very general value in the books which attempt to ascribe precise flavours, characters and qualities to hundreds of individual wines. The majority of readers infer that such books set opinions on wine and therefore the wines themselves in concrete. You have no real idea when the wines were tasted or how many wines the author sampled that day. I’ll dwell on that later.

Books of tasting notes can only offer the broadest indication of a wine’s quality, unless the wine was so bad when tasted that no amount of time will have improved it in bottle.

Reviews in daily papers or monthly publications are more immediate and at least you can be more confident, that regardless of whether or not you agree with the reviewer, that you are both tasting approximately the same thing.

All people are different and in the area of wine evaluation, these differences can be paramount. Wine’s flavour is such an infinitely complex mixture of many chemical groups, some regarded as beneficial, some not, and some undecided, that it is nearly impossible for a single human being to be so equipped to be able to detect each and every one of these amid the myriads of others present in a single wine.

The Australian Wine Research Institute takes this extremely seriously and constructs tasting panels of individuals carefully selected on the basis of what their palate has been proven to be able to detect. When three or four people are chosen in this manner the reliability of the panel far outweighs that of all but the most extraordinary individual. I wouldn’t suggest that wine reviewers don’t seek the opinions of other reviewers, wine makers or retailers, but most wine reviews are unquestionably individual opinions.

It stands to reason that every reviewer will have one area of weakness, whether it be in detecting hydrogen sulphide rotten egg gas, acetone nail polish remover, sulphur dioxide a little like burned matches or whatever. If your palate is strong where a reviewer’s is weak, you may continually disagree with that reviewer, but at least with reason.

Although it is virtually impossible for the reader to detect their presence by simply reading a wine review, there are several other factors that can influence their accuracy. A critic may attempt to taste two or three hundred wines in a single day in order to meet a publishing deadline. I am not alone in questioning the worth of comments made under these conditions, for I fail to see how anyone could appreciate each subtlety and intricacy of so many wines in such a short time.

It is also inconceivable that a wine’s label will not influence a critic’s comments, but on occasions it may be entirely appropriate to sample unmasked wine. Do art critics ask for the painter’s signature to be obliterated from their view? Do music critics take unlabelled LP’s or CD’s home to spend time listening to? All I can suggest is that if a critic feels pressured by a wine’s reputation, he or she should be very careful. And of course the best are.

A Yarra Valley pinot noir I tasted recently looked rather less than impressive, but no clear reason for its poor performance stood out. Luckily I had tasted the wine before and was able to request another bottle, which was every bit as good as my memories and its reputation. Around one in every hundred or so wine corks has the potential to badly affect wine, as had clearly happened in this case, but not so obviously that poor corkage was readily apparent in the first bottle. If I hadn’t tried the wine before, and was not aware of which wine I was tasting, I could well have been critical in print or else might not have published any favourable comments. The same could happen to any critic, any time. Corks are a constant and under-rated source of variability

The mood, health, fitness and attitude of the taster are also important sources of variation in opinion. If you tasted the same agressive young red wine after a sleepless night at the end of a long week and then after several days’ sleep and relaxation you could easily wind up with two contrary opinions.

I have copies of a national Australian wine magazine in which two quite contrary opinions of the same wine are published in the same issue. All that does is confirm how much a wine may appear different from day to day with different people.

As I have indicated, I am not out to decry either review or writer, but to help to interpret the remarks. There are more words written about wine per capita in Australia than any other country and it is just possible that we take them too seriously. Please login to post comment