Are Wine Reviews Worth Reading?

More words are written about wine per capita in Australia than in any other country, and we do take them too literally.

Three years ago I received a newly-released Jimmy Watson Trophy winner to review. The razamatazz that accompanies the release of the Jimmy Watson wine means you can’t ignore it. The wine’s publicity to that stage was very generous, the response predictably hysterical.

The wine itself was acceptable. Not bad, but nothing special. I went to print saying that its palate was short and incomplete, and 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.

The wine hasn’t been reviewed favourably 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?

Many wine reviews are worth a look at, but if a problem exists, it’s in the way they’re interpreted.

Wine reviews are taken out of all context. Blessings abundant in the rag or glossy can help truckloads of wines sell out in no time at all. Bad reviews can also impact in the same magnitude. A couple of bad remarks on an indifferent wine could send a small to medium-sized company to the wall and ruin the livelihoods of several families.

It’s 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. 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. Most critics would rather not write anything at all.

As a consequence, we 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.

One of the most important aspects of a wine review is when it was written. 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. You will see clearly how much a wine changes with time.

Reviews are instantaneous snapshots of a critic’s opinion. 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, for instance, to send to press an evaluation of a young red wine just uncorked. In addition to this, wine contributors to magazines with extended lead-times, which may extend up to six months, should acknowledge that the wine may be up to twice as old by the time the review goes to press and adapt their views accordingly.

Books purporting to ascribe precise flavours, characters and qualities to hundreds of individual wines are of limited value, for they date quickly. Readers infer that these books set opinions on wine and therefore the wines themselves in concrete.

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.

It stands to reason that every reviewer will have one area of weakness, and if your palate is strong where a reviewer’s is weak, you may continually disagree with that reviewer, but at least with reason.

Other factors may influence the accuracy of a review. A critic may attempt to taste two or three hundred wines in a single day in order to meet a publishing deadline. 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?

Corks are a constant and under-rated source of variability. Around one in every hundred wine corks has the potential to badly affect wine, sometimes not so obviously that poor corkage is readily apparent. A Yarra Valley pinot noir I tasted recently looked less than impressive, but no clear reason for its poor performance stood out. Luckily I had tasted the wine before and opened another bottle, which was every bit as good as my memories and its reputation. If I hadn’t tried the wine before, and was not aware of what 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.

The taster’s mood, health, fitness and attitude are also 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 arrive at two contrary opinions. In a former national Australian wine magazine two quite contrary opinions of the same wine are published in the same issue. The same wine may appear different from day to day to different people.

Read the reviews, but don’t accept them blindly. Your point of view is just as important as the writer’s. Please login to post comment