it was the best of wines. it was the worst of wines — what even is a wine review?
It was the best of wines. It was the worst of wines. What even is a wine review?
It’s reported that literary legend Charles Dickens, responsible for the opening line we’ve just butchered to death down a back ally, was quite the wine connoisseur. Seldom does a Dickens novel not include a cask or keg within its pages at some point but it’s clear the man was a personal fan of fine wine. His ledger book is said to have outlined expenditure of close to £15,000 ($28,656.98NZD) per year just on grape juice (a figure that hasn’t been converted to today’s inflation rate)
Dickens preference was Italian wines and given that wad of cash he dropped on his hobby, you have to assume that he was either very confident in what he was buying or had help. The truth is Dickens did lean on wine experts and their assessment of what was the good gear.
For most of us, our ‘great expectations’ rest with something under $30 bucks and anything over $30 bucks is reserved for special occasions and it bloody well better deliver. Regardless of the occasion we still want the bottle we buy to deliver for the dollars we handover to get it.
As we loiter about the wine isle, tapping our chin, deep in thought trying to choose our booze based largely on guess work, it reveals we also could do with a helping hand. It makes sense then, that we flock to bottles that tote little round stickers of gold or silver that indicate that someone, somewhere has rated the wine a good buy. But what do those stickers actually mean?
We ascertain that a wine with a sticker (of any kind) represents that people with more knowledge than us have deemed this bottle good value for money. We automatically trust the people or organisations who have reviewed the wine and bestowed upon it said sticker but why do we trust them? Who even are they? And what’s the process they use for judging wines? These are questions we don’t even think to ask as we reach for a bottle donned with a sticker. That small addition to the packaging absolves us of any failure and personal liability if the wine fails to pair well with the hot chook and salad we’ve already popped in the shopping cart.
Before we learn more about how wine is judged and by whom, let’s just start by stating that we’re of the opinion that anyone who gets juice into a bottle deserves a medal. They should run around the arena in a victory lap for they have surely won the race they were running. While some of us can’t even grow a lettuce, these people make delicious wine from leafy vines held up by wires. It’s nothing short of a miracle and it’s an effort I’d like to acknowledge.
There are almost 700 wineries in Aotearoa. Very few of those are represented at the local grocer’s. There are compelling reasons for this. Many wineries don’t produce enough wine to be able to supply at the supermarket level. In general, wine on the shelf at the supie is made by larger producers. Don’t misread that as bad. There are some beaut wines made by mass. Most of that wine pleases most of the people most of the time.
Pricing is a key factor for a wine making it to the supermarket shelf and supermarket pricing seldom represents the high production costs of making wine. The only way to bring those production costs down is to make a lot of it.
There are some great, smaller producers represented in the wine isle but they tend to be more expensive (comparatively) and therefore slower moving. That applies pressure to the producer to be content with goods not selling quickly and it threatens their relationship with their Distributor and the Grocer, who also wants their stock to sell well. It is here, that the elusive medal sticker or wine review really starts to matter. The minute we’re tempted to spend a little more, the more we look to lean on the expertise of a wine reviewer for guidance.
While this is a little different in the fine wine retail store, a place where hopefully you’re more likely to find an actual human on hand to help, we’re still directed by scores and stickers on bottles.
It’s really clear, then, that it isn’t just us that needs a sticker or medal or point scores but the winemakers need them too. If they hope to sell their wine then they need a quick, eye-catching and effective way to recommend their wine to us as we whip around the grocery store or stand in the wine shop overwhelmed by the wall of wine brands.
If you listened to our podcast with Ata Rangi winemaker, Helen Masters when quizzed on the topic of wine reviews she made a really good point, “We’re kiwis. We can’t really talk about the wine we make. We probably need someone else to talk about our wines for us.”
She’s right. Painful modesty is in our DNA. None of us are all that great at blowing our own trumpet so it makes sense that wineries rely on an independent person to judge the wine and give it a score or pop a sticker on it.
Though Helen went onto explain that the points system can be confusing because a 16 out of 20 by one reviewer can mean the wine is a total banger, whereas the same score from another reviewer might mean you’ve got a bit of a dud on your hands. Sheesh — straight back into Insecure Confusionville for the normal folk out there just trying to a pick a delicious wine.
With a wine review being such a life raft for both the drinker and the maker then it might be good to better understand the process and how better to do that than to talk to the pros.
I asked three terribly good people from the biz and who clearly love wine so much they have dedicated their lives to it, to extrapolate a little on the matter. They all write about wine, judge it and they review it for a number of different publications both here and abroad. They have all earned major stripes in the form of internationally revered and very tough-to-achieve wine qualifications. They have all been kind enough to put their thoughts down in black and white to explain how they feel about this very grey area.
Emma Jenkins MW (L) & Jane Skilton MW
Emma Jenkins MW & Jane Skilton MW — both Masters of Wine, freelance wine writers, bloody good pals and co-curators of The Independent Wine Monthly commented succinctly, “You are right that this is a bit of a minefield. If you’re buying from a supermarket, you probably have to just accept that you're taking your chances.
While many of the bottles might have stickers on them, closer examination will reveal that these could be rather spurious awards such a ‘Winery of the Year’, or from reviewers who are paid directly by producers, which doesn’t confer any genuine impartiality. Stickers from wine shows should at least have independence, and are judged blind, (hopefully!) by experienced judges. ”
Jenkins & Skilton go on to make an extremely valid point, “Wine drinkers who want to expand their horizons or support smaller/independent producers would be best to find a good wine merchant. They won’t necessarily pay more than at a supermarket, and are likely to end up with much more interesting wine as a result. Scoring is another minefield, attempting as it does to make the subjective objective, though once one becomes familiar with the writer/reviewer, then at least it's easier to discern how their relative scores work. Best we can suggest is simply to do your homework on whose recommendations you’re reading…”
Getting to know your wine writers and reviewers is sage advice. As Jenkins & Skilton explained, reviewing wine is trying to make a subjective pursuit objective. Having an understanding of who the reviewer is means you learn where they come from and what matters to them. If their values align with yours, chances are you’re on the road to successfully understanding how they score wine.
New Zealand’s only Master Sommelier, Cameron Douglas, who works as a freelance writer and international wine consultant for The Lodge Bar, not only reviews and writes about wine on his own review site, CamDouglasms.com, but he’s even created his own stickers!! Seems like he’s a highly qualified guy to ask about this whole thing.
“As a consumer, I never purchased wine bottles with stickers on. I was always price driven and brand driven and story driven.” Douglas starts out. “Whether a bottle had a sticker on it or not didn’t bother me. That began to change when I started building a reputation as a wine taster – someone who could evaluate wine and offer an opinion on it.
Cam Douglas MS at Misha’s Vineyard in one of his many trips visiting NZ wineries, tasting wines at the source.
I deliberately avoided going down the ‘sticker on bottle’ avenue because I built my reputation on the opinions that I had of wine and not on whether the score was high enough for any kind of medal, gold, silver or bronze sticker and I found them very confusing.”
This is interesting commentary from someone who now has his own range of wine stickers. Douglas goes on to qualify his approach, “As a wine writer I’m there to recognise quality within the context of a particular variety or style of wine and I write my tasting notes accordingly. When I was first involved in wine judging the judging system was on a 20 points scale. Now the most common one is a 100 point scale. Everything seems to be transferrable into a 5 star system…so I see as a result of that there’s quite a bit of confusion in the market place. What works better? 5 stars? 19 points? 95 points? It must be really confusing for the consumer to make a decision.”
It feels a lot like Douglas has got our backs. He’s not a fan of the gold, silver, bronze medal idea sighting it feels “sports orientated”, like there was some race to win as opposed to an assessment of value. His comments on points also reflect what winemaker Helen Masters suggested about the points being hard to follow as well. Based on all this, how has Douglas side-stepped this confusion but created a sticker successful in helping us get our mittens on a magical bottle of wine? Douglas states that his stickers are designed to reflect the quality and value a bottle of wine offers.
“[All my stickers] have the same colour (Douglas’ signature mustang yellow) and I use terminology to rate the wine. The words Recommended, Premium, Excellent or Outstanding are on my stickers. ‘Recommended’ states this wine is one I’d recommend to my friends or to a consumer who is learning about wine or is looking for value. ‘Premium’ means that this wine is a premium quality wine. ‘Excellent’ meaning excellent wine within the category. For example, within the Sauvignon Blanc category, is this wine an ‘Excellent’ representation? I think it’s a word that a lot of people understand. Perhaps more so than a generic gold or silver medal. And then of course there’s ‘Outstanding’. What I’m trying to do is express to the discerning drinker that if they buy this bottle of wine they will likely agree with my recommendation.”
Douglas’ approach does feel a lot more user friendly. The removal of medal colours and replacement with one consistent colour palette across all his stickers also underpins that this is his opinion, that the sticker is wholly about his expert rating and that’s reassuring. I’m sure Dickens expected his wine merchants to advise him with emotive adjectives rather than numbers and would be an avid follower of Douglas’ lead.
Ashley Roberts (L), John Connell (C) & Pete Connell (R) of By The Bottle wine store.
As a final consideration I thought of our pals at By The Bottle. They made a definitive decision not to include any reviews — internal or external — on their online wine store. Pete Connell, one of the three amigos behind the wine service explained, “We made a really conscious decision when we started By The Bottle not to use ratings, medals or external reviews. Just to be clear, we have oodles of respect for the wine professionals who do review and rate wine, and recognise it’s reassuring to have endorsement of our purchasing decisions.
Having spent our careers working with plonk, we know that our thoughts on a wine are shaped not just by what’s in the glass, but also by how we experienced it. This is especially true when tasting with a producer at the place where it was grown. The impression left by the landscape, the story and the people behind a wine informs our opinion on it. We love that and don’t want to sum it up with just a score or medal. We’d rather focus on connecting our customers to that story. Being a small independent retailer, we’re naturally drawn to producers who are small and independent too, those who sit outside of the mainstream. Guidance to customers comes in the form of simple scales that indicate the style of the wine, with notes providing context on the region/variety/producer. We also often give our thoughts on a good time and place to enjoy the bottle. We want to build understanding and context for our customers, rather than try to simplify it with a score.”
So, from what I can tell, the wine industry needs reviews because we, the wine drinker, need reviews too. Like movie or restaurant reviews help us decide how and where we spend our precious spare time and money so too does a wine reviewer help us navigate the foggy fields of wine appreciation. Much like a good therapist, finding the right reviewer for you seems like a good idea. The wine writer who shares your values and has a like-minded approach to the world of vino should become a welcome educator and ally.
My take on all of this, as unprofessional/totally works in the industry as I am, is that whether I’m buying wine or a designer lamp for the lounge, I base my decision on what suits my taste, what suits my budget and then finally on the endorsement of someone I trust and respect who I consider more knowledgeable then me. If Simon James likes a lamp, then chances are I’ll like it too. If Emma Jenkins & Jane Skilton, who love dogs as much as I do and are both bloody hilarious to talk to, rate a wine then stand aside as I reach for the bottle.
Final word: If I had the bank account to buy wine like Dickens, I’d have no problem putting my worn out wallet in the wise and capable hands of all of these dedicated experts. Also, don’t be afraid to like what you like, regardless of a score or sticker. See the reviews for what they are: guidance as opposed to guarantee. If you want trusted advice, do your research, find yourself a qualified wine writer you like and stick with them.
Learn the term:
we’re super grateful to our pals at antipodes water company. they supply us with the good water for our chats. antipodes is an artesian water that contains no chemicals, and when you’re pouring an organic wine that is gold. the mineral content also keeps the palate fresh so you can taste the wine the way the winemaker and nature intended you to. thanks antipodes, you’re the bomb. antipodes.co.nz
