Whether or not he deserved it, the latest criticism (centered on the relationship between Miller and his man in Spain, Pancho Camp MW – mainly covered on UK blogger Jim Budd’s Loire site) was making more noise than BigJ’s tasting notes.

I even talked about it earlier this year, when Miller and Campo were in Priorat. Of course, looking back on it now, it all seems exceptionally tedious. That said, comparing a great wine to watching porn – conjuring up the rather unappetising image of Jay Miller in onanistic delight – was at best naive and at worst reprehensible.

And now he’s gone – not because of the pressure, by the way:

Some may believe my stepping down is in response to my critics. Nothing could be further from the truth.

An interesting statement given that, apart from outlining his future projects, the rest of his announcement is a response to his critics.

But questions still remain:

> What of Pancho Campo MW’s role as facilitator for the Wine Advocate‘s Spanish taster (now Neal Martin)? The problem with Miller’s statement is that his resignation from The Wine Advocate claims to be unrelated to the recent bad press surrounding him and Campo. If The Wine Advocate wishes to maintain this line, there are only two options: 1 – Pancho remains (Parker can’t bring an end to his services because that really will look like the bad press has got to The Wine Advocate) or 2 – Pancho ends his contract with The Wine Advocate himself.

> Neal Martin. The envy of amateur wine bloggers everywhere. Tim Atkin MW’s quote on Twitter attributed to Neal Martin: ‘I have never really got under the skin of Spanish wine’ was perhaps not the nicest way to welcome someone into a new job and to be fair to Neal this was in 2006 and, well, let’s see how he gets along. ‘Time to start trying, Neal,’ said Atkin. Indeed. But this wasn’t really my point. My point is to look at some of the gruelling beats Neal Martin and the Parker team – not to mention the one-man-bands like Atkin or Jancis Robinson MW – have to cover and wonder if they can ever ‘get under the skin’ of any region. People like Atkin, Robinson, Parker, Tanner, etc. cover huge areas of wine. Just reading Miller’s old domain: Spain, South America and the Pacific Northwest, looked like more than a full time job, it looked positively Sisyphean.

> But perhaps the biggest point I want to end with is this: is it fair to close any discussion about the standards of wine writers with the threat of legal action? Last week, Parker said this:

I have been asked by our USA lawyers to refrain from commenting about this given the potential lawsuits by Jay,by Pancho, and possibly by TWA [The Wine Advocate] against these bloggers. Until we are 100% certain of all the facts, I think this subject, which appears to be a reckless and malicious disregard for the truth and clearly aimed at damaging Miller, Campo, and TWA, needs to be closed.

Now, I don’t have an axe grind against Parker, but to threaten legal action against a blogger or bloggers while at the same time calling into question the ethics of those bloggers [Not being certain of the facts while saying there "appears to be a reckless and malicious disregard for the truth" is a bit pot-kettle-black], and thus closing any discussion on the topic…well, let’s just say I find that a bit worrying. If that’s the future of wine writing in Social Media, I’d rather not be a part of it.

A lot of the time, when arguments are hypothetical or based on ideas or notions in the world of wine, a good retort is to say this: ‘well, just taste it and then let’s talk’.

Don’t like Natural Wines? Just taste a few. Think Biodynamics is hocus-pocus? Just taste a few Biodynamic wines. Don’t like Robert Parker? Just taste some of the wines he rates highly. Don’t like the price of Lafite? Just taste the wine.

Not all of these cases will work. I, for one, know that I will love the Lafite but that I’ll still not like it’s price.

However, while there may well be a lot of Parker-loved wines that I don’t like, there are (admittedly) just as many again that I completely agree with him on.

And as for Natural or Biodynamic wines, I have tasted enough of both to be able to tell you that both practises make some quite fantastic bottles. The proof of the pudding is in the eating and, well, it generally tastes pretty damned nice.

So why don’t we just insist that everyone stop talking theory and start tasting in practice? Nothing, except that I have one reservation – namely that letting the wine do the talking can only work one way round: no one can be allowed to talk before it has its say.

Imagine, for instance, I am about to introduce a talk by Noam Chomsky. I can preface it by saying the man has some very dubious and quite ridiculous ideas that have done nothing but seek to confound the truth since the Vietnam War or I can say that he is the most astute and correct political commentator in the last 50 years. Or, more correctly, I can shut up and let him talk.

My reservations about Natural Wines or Biodynamics remain (bizarrely, I’m perhaps more enamoured of Biodynamics than Natural but that’s just a mental weakness of mine) and not least in the field of marketing – in other words, I was (and remain) dubious about labelling wines as ‘Natural’ when there is no consensus as to what that actually means. Calling a wine ‘Natural’ in this sense is basically speaking about it before it’s tasted. That is just as unfair as the anti-Natural wines people saying ‘all Natural wines are a con’. It’s just as bad as Natural wine proponents having a go at commercially made wines.

If you ever want to prove a point about such ‘fads’ (I use the term very lightly), simply arrange a blind tasting mixing up Natural, Biodynamic, ‘Commercial’ [whatever that means] and, I don’t know, holistic wines. Ask people to taste them and see which type of wine they prefer.

Of course, the Biodynamic crowd might complain that the tasting was on a root day, but I can pretty much guarantee a fair spread across preferences for all ‘types’ of wine. Why? Well probably because that’s just the way wine is. One person might not like the muddy-coloured oxidised Natural wine but might like the Natural Beaujolais several bottles down.

So to conclude: (1) never allow anyone to talk about a wine before you’ve put your lips to the glass and swirled it around your tongue, (2) always taste blind when tasting for assessment (people who say a label doesn’t affect them are as trustworthy as those who constantly tell you they can only fall in love with someone’s inner beauty) and (3) by all means, maintain dogmatic views on things (it would be so boring otherwise) just don’t bring them out until after the wine’s been tasted.

[If it is true that some wine critics can not be swayed by a label just as much as people can fall in love with someone's inner beauty, perhaps we should pay more attention to women tasters given that most men I know are about as deep as a two-day old puddle - and as attractive.]

I meant it. €29,000 is a decent enough salary in Spain. For that price I could inundate the blog and twittersphere with Murcian wines. And for a whole year – not just one issue of the The Wine Advocate. In fact, I know a handful (and there must be a whole host more) of people who could do this for Murcia without the regional wine body having to spend anywhere near that sum. Bloggers are (by their very nature) happy with what they get so there’s no need to set them up in a five-star hotel or a Parador. As long as the bed’s warm, the welcome’s ‘quirky’ and there’s decent Wifi, we’re happy.

But, of course, as most marketing people will tell me, Jay Miller represents a more tangible return on investment. Murcia certainly thinks he’s worth forking out €29,000 for. So there must be a reason why that’s so.

And what is that reason? Probably – and I’m going out on a limb here – because they reckon that if they shower him with a lavish hotel and (just as likely) a multi-channel TV with prepaid porn, their investment will reap its reward. With high scores and better sales. If they didn’t think that I – or any other wine blogger – would be getting the same service.

But you see, we bloggers are not guaranteed to move sales that much (I think that’s slowly changing but clearly regional bodies are putting their money where they think they’ll get the most return – and it ain’t on bloggers’ field trips). Wine writers – proper ones – are.

So what does that make their role if most wine professionals believe that if you spend enough money on them, you’ll make more money back? Even some ‘proper’ critics recognise this. A week or so ago, Michel Bettane criticised wine producers for paying critics to taste their wines.

Indeed, at the same conference Bettane was at, Miller’s fellow Parker contributor, David Schildknecht, bemoaned the fact that ‘…Producers are naive. They think they have to pay to have a wine writer visit – this will start happening more and more.’

Yes, David, just look at what’s being forked out for your buddy Miller and his visit to Murcia…

Indeed, while I don’t know whether or not Bettane and Desseauve charge producers to enter their wines for their annual publication, I’m damned sure they don’t buy in all the bottles they rate.

But the point that Bettane and Schildknecht miss is that producers wouldn’t be paying them if they didn’t think there would be a certain ‘return on investment’.

So if it’s worth forking out for a wine writer, you have to think that the odds of getting a decent review (i.e. better sales) are higher. Imagine, for instance, Miller having to book his own Ryanair flight to some godforsaken strip of tarmac in the most desolate part of Murcia. Imagine him having to pay for his own seedy bedsit in Cartagena. It may well be that, like a lot of people, he absolutely loves it – rightly so. It may well be that he is grumpy and disheartened by the lack of attention he gets, especially after being pickpocketed in a back alley. Far safer (and this doesn’t just count for Miller) to put him up and cosset him every day.

There’s a lot of criticism of wine bloggers by ‘established’ critics these days but you have to wonder what bastions of moral integrity they are if producers and regions think it’s worth paying them for the trouble to be ‘professional’.

Perhaps the logical conclusion of Bettane’s complaint is that wine critics should actually have to pay for all the wines they taste. Believe you me, we might actually get some proper scores when it comes to Bordeaux. Or just very rich wine critics.

By which we can all assume that he means Rosso di Montalcino doesn’t sell well. Uncontroversial. But the notion that what is good for an appellation is that it sells well (a merchant’s equation) is by no means what we would see as the founding principle of an appellation. But this depends on your point of view.

There are two reasons why we have appellations. The first is basic economic protectionism – we have a product we wish no-one to copy and it must be made from such-and-such a region (this avoids the kind of situation whereby Australians make Chablis – although, it seems, Sherry can be found in Missouri). The second is that it is an attempt to maintain a kind of cultural zone of protection that ensures the wines we know (and, dare I say, love) are not altered beyond our conservative estimation of what they should be (ie how they should taste). These are by no means mutually exclusive notions (and I would point out that the second point grows from the first) but it is interesting that, for the majority of people, appellations are viewed as the second point – something cultural, not commercial.

That view, therefore, is totally at odds with Antinori’s. Indeed, saying an appellation is culture must, by definition, resist almost any change to its rules, especially changes motivated by base economic desire or financial circumstance. Sure, Antinori and the like might make a quick buck if he could plant Cabernet or Pinot Noir or whatever in Montalcino, but would it still be Rosso di Montalcino? Would we be up in arms if someone suggested allowing Riesling or Barbera or Cabernet Franc in Volnay? Of course we would. But Volnay is successful, therefore why change it?

Unfortunately, however, appellations are not created by anthropologists. They are primarily a brand on which producers can piggy back their way into people’s cellars. They are open to change if those within deem it necessary or profitable – see the pending elevation of Quarts de Chaume to Grand Cru status. No lesser person tha Andrew Jefford himself blogged on the subject earlier this week.

In fact, the shocking part of Jefford’s blog was the appended list of ‘Grand Crus in waiting’. Honestly: ‘Croupes de Pauillac’ or ‘Croupes de Margaux’? They sound like a poo-shaped cheese. But putting the ridiculous names aside, reading that list was like getting a view into the minds of people like Piero Antinori: you can bet your life the ‘lesser’ Pauillac’s don’t have much vineyards on the Croupes, you can see where ‘St-Emilion Terrasse de Figeac’ is going, and there’s no points for guessing who’s on the Pomerol ‘Haute [Günz] Terrasse’. There’s enough elitism in these places already without the INAO (France’s appellation body) creating further reasons for the holier (and richer) than thou to tell us the ‘Croupes de Sauternes’ once again outperformed their neighbours.

So perhaps I should close by asking people to disabuse themselves of the notion that appellations are quaint little zones of anthropology at work and start to realise that they are nothing but a commercial circle jerk. A rebel in me wants a group of Rosso di Montalcino producers to nip Antinori’s proposals in the bud but I hold little hope. Appellations, eh. Perhaps we’d be better off without them?

This is no rant against expensive wines and the people who put them on sale for that price (though heaven knows, there’s enough to be getting on with), this is merely an affirmation that if the general level of winemaking and quality has gone up since the 50s, 60s and 70s, our efforts and focus should turn from the greats to look at the rest.

Sure, Hello! magazine might concentrate on the likes of the Duquesa de Alba, William Windsor or Kate Middleton, but if everyone was getting better looking, we’d only need to say hello to the boy or girl next door and save our subscription to Hello! to take him or her out for a drink. The same is true of wine.

If wines overall are getting better, why are we so fascinated with the all-time greats? From what I gather, most veteran tasters would have rated a young 1959 Cheval Blanc the same as they might an overblown, over-extracted Toro today. Perhaps a renowned wine taster will tell me that the Claret’s terroir gives it the edge over the beefy Toro but if, in 50 year’s time, I’m going to have more or less the same experience as a show-off wine collector has today with his or her ’59 Cheval, I’d be laughing all the way to the bank. And back.

And are the greatest wines getting correspondingly better? I doubt it. Granted, they’ve invested a lot of money in laser sorting tables, hand destemming and Infra-Red vineyard management tools, but all that’s doing is adding 5-10% extra. I believe we’re talking about much greater improvements in the world of the more wallet-friendly wines.

Lately I’ve had a few wines that most experienced tasters would class as unexceptional (either producer, vintage or both) that have been sitting in my cellar for some time. They have been wildly impressive and will go on being wildly impressive and truly enjoyable for many more years. They might be said to ‘punch above their weight’ – or some similar form of ‘praise’ given out by our venerated wine gurus that is basically a put-down. But I think it truer to say they are just great wines, and they might well be the great wines of the future.

So why is it, if the ‘lesser’ wines we can buy off a high street merchant’s shelf are equivalent to the great Vosne-Romanée’s and Pauillac’s of yesteryear, are we still bombarded with these ‘Royals’? Sure, they make a pretty picture, but you don’t need them to be drinking like a king. This might be no revelation to a lot of people, but we can still ask why tasters and writers continue to turn up to the banquet.

There is, though, a very positive point to all this. In about thirty years’ time (long after we’ve left ‘great’ wines to the collectors and millionaires), our wine gurus will be the people who, today, told us to buy the €15 Bergerac, or the £20 UK Sparkling, or the $25 Virginia Viognier. And, given that winemaking has improved immeasurably, if we rave about certain unknown wines these days, the chances are we’ll be proved right. So go on, sieze the day, and really hype the unknown wines. Any old fool can tell you to buy a Bordeaux First Growth.

Typically, the whole affair screamed, whimpered, fell silent, and went away in relatively quick time. But it’s not the only case of this kind of wine fraud: the Georges Duboeuf company was fined €30,000 in 2006 for incorrectly labelling thousands of litres of generic Beaujolais Villages as something else. Plus ça change, right?

Now, consumer advocates should (and do) get quite angry about this sort of thing: this isn’t just a Chinese wheeler-dealer buying a few palettes of bargain-basement red wine and relabelling it as ‘Château Laffitte‘ (given that we already have the likes of a ‘Smith-Haut Lafitte’ you might wonder where marketing ends and fraud begins but that’s another topic), this is the actual estates themselves being implicated in potentially selling you what’s not on the label.

But anger, after the fact, is about as far as it goes. Most self-professed’consumer advocates’ do not wish to get tangled up in this arena. I don’t blame them just as I don’t really blame Robert Parker for not once mentioning the possibility of producer fraud in his lengthy August 2011 piece on fraudulent wines ‘In Vino Veritas’ – of course, the benefit of the doubt should always lie with the producer – but it does beg the question of why (especially given the professed lack of surprise in the wine trade about the Brunellopoli revelations) there is no desire among our crusading journalists to begin to delve into it.

Here’s why I think we don’t: I’ve got a potential story here in Spain. In a village I know well, one of the worst white grapes being grown (Malvasia) is selling at €0.50 a kg and although that seems a pitiful price, it’s actually a very good deal for a high-cropping, high-sugar, relatively bland grape – especially in relation to the likes of the ‘nobler’ Verdejo which is commanding about the same, if not less.

The reason for this unusual micro-economic situation is that ‘Galicians’ are buying the grapes from the viticulturalists at that price. Now, this could be a totally innocuous situation and the grapes might well be going straight to distilleries in Galicia; they may not. There are all sorts of theories.

But I wont investigate it. Why? Because if I do, and I find something nocuous, I run the risk of destroying the current price of Malvasia. And I’ll tell you right now that I would rather turn a blind eye to my neighbour than have him spit in that eye every morning. I want to be able to walk down the road without being worried of crossing anyone with a grudge against me, not least my friends.

That road can be as wide as two rows of tables in New York or London behind which producers are serving people tastings of their wines.

Incidentally, one of Parker’s few references to producer fraud I found was in a 1999 article on, of all places, Burgundy:

“There remain too many producers who present buyers and writers with barrel samples of wine that are not representative of what later appears in the bottle – misrepresentation at the minimum, fraud at the worst.”

This is another potential type of fraud, the possibility of which is conveniently forgotten every year at the Bordeaux En Primeur barrel tastings [the clue is in the 'barrel' bit].

]]> http://wine-life.co.uk/news-review/wine-fraud-why-no-one-talks-about-it/feed 0 http://wine-life.co.uk/winemaking/vintage-2011-malvasia http://wine-life.co.uk/winemaking/vintage-2011-malvasia#comments Tue, 27 Sep 2011 12:12:58 +0000 Oliver Styles http://wine-life.co.uk/?p=1333 Before I bring you the latest ‘news’ on my 2011 production, I feel it would be wrong of me to gloss over my Vendange Hative Malvasia and the Blood of the Abandoned.

Firstly, the Vendanges Hatives: after stopping the fermentation (with the addition of Sulphur) and then bottling, the resultant juice was relatively sweet and ‘pretty good’ (at least that’s what Isabelle Legeron MW told me – the rest of the unbiased tasters remained tactfully silent when I opened a bottle but, in retrospect, they obviously knew nothing about wine). Could it be that Isabelle was being overly kind? Surely not.

Nonetheless, several weeks later, the juice decided it had had enough and began to ferment as much of the left-over sugar as it could – this despite the presence of the Sulphur which obviously decided that discretion was the better part of valour and let the yeast do its worst. I found all the bottles had blown their corks and had turned into a volatile, highly alcoholic – but still sweet – joke on the theme of an Italian Vin Santo (oxidised ‘n’ all). It’s now on ullage in a demijohn acquiring ever-more VA and looking like a candidate for a joke on the theme of Balsamic Vinegar. I wouldn’t mind so much if I hadn’t gone to all the effort. It’s heartbreaking, but it’s my fault for not being thorough enough.

As for the Blood of the abandoned (95% late-harvest Malvasia and 5% late-harvest Tempranillo): it was – and remains – an absolute dog. The VA (Volatile Acidity) was quite high and hence a little off-putting but that was nothing compared with trying to taste it. Despite trying to stop the ferment, the yeast (AWRI 1503) was not to be held down and of course fermented through to dryness which gave around 15% alcohol (possibly more – I could never bring myself to measure it). Tasting a volatile, hugely alcoholic rosé was just too much – it was so brutal I couldn’t once bring myself to swallow it – I’d have probably come out in a rash. It was an angry gorilla in a tutu.

This year, I’ve got about 60 litres of Malvasia settling in tank at 25 Brix – a brutal potential alcohol of 15-16%. It’s going to get the works too: enzymes, alcohol-reduction liquid (water), cultured yeast, acidity correction and so on. If I can promise one thing about the outcome: Natural Wine it wont be.

]]> http://wine-life.co.uk/winemaking/vintage-2011-malvasia/feed 0 http://wine-life.co.uk/news-review/wine-and-anarchy-winemaking-by-committee http://wine-life.co.uk/news-review/wine-and-anarchy-winemaking-by-committee#comments Thu, 22 Sep 2011 14:00:47 +0000 Oliver Styles http://wine-life.co.uk/?p=1318 Everyone agrees (though with differing interpretations) that in Barcelona in 1936, something rather special happened. The city and the surrounding countryside witnessed the first ever successful Anarcho-Syndicalist Revolution. Indeed, Anarchy reigned. And it did pretty well until factional disagreements (basically the Communists, who by nature don’t like decentralised power, started being ‘difficult’) and the close of the Spanish Civil War in favour of a Galician monorchid and his rabid henchmen brought the Socialist dream to a close.

Nonetheless, the Anarcho-Syndicalist rule of Catalonia functioned so well, it convinced the likes of George Orwell that a Socialist Revolution was not only possible but desirable. It also passed into the annals of anarchist history and to mention Barcelona in the late 30s renders present-day anarchists misty-eyed and nostalgic for a time they never knew.

Anarchy is too broad a topic to examine in any depth in a wine blog, but suffice it to say that, in very general terms, the anarchist movement is Socialist (it seeks to give all profits derived from labour to those who labour), Syndicalist (control of the workspace and all decisions are deferred to the workforce through democratic unions), Revolutionary (it does not believe centralised governments will dismantle themselves in order to give people control of their own place of work) and anti-State. It does not believe in rule by a state system or in any form of rule by minority.

But I digress from my original thought which was to try to understand whether the likes of a Priorat winery would be able to make wine on Anarcho-Syndicalist principles.

These days, the wine world loves the cult of the personality: Helen Turley, Michel Rolland, Stephane Derenoncourt, Angelo Gaja, the late Robert Mondavi, Warren Winiarski, the late Alois Kracher, Rene Barbier, the late Didier Dagueneau, and so on.

But let us imagine that in 1936, the wineries in Priorat were taken over by the people that worked in them. Indeed, what if all wines were made democratically with input from the people working in the winery? There’s no reason why winemaking by committee is not possible; the debate must centre on whether a wine produced under the direction of all those working in the winery is more desirable (or not) than one made by an individual – a winemaker.

Could it be that ‘dictatorial winemaking’ produces the best wines for individuals (Parker likes Rolland wines, etc.) but that an Anarcho-Syndicalist Grenache might please as many people as it alienates?

I dislike posts in which I am inconclusive but I honestly don’t know the answer. I would, if pushed, probably say that an Anarcho-Syndicalist winery would produce a range of wines that would be much more interesting than, say, a Michel Rolland winery. I would even suggest that in saying that, I’m being quite uncontroversial. But would the Anarcho-Syndicalist wines be ‘better’? It’s a very difficult thing to say but inasmuch as what our accepted notions of quality consist of, they might not be.

Or is it – and here’s a thought – simply that winemaking, as a craft, requires only single voice and a single vision? Is it possible that ‘factory’ winemaking (by which I mean wine made by more than one individual) is an abberation?

It’s a shame that the vineyards of Catalonia were largely destroyed by phylloxera prior to the Spanish Civil War or we may have more evidence on which to base ourselves.

To close, let me tell you about a man I once worked with. Mark (I’ve changed his name) is late middle-aged, works in a winery and is a general cellarhand. Noted for his overreaching apathy, laziness, and unceasing ability to delegate hard work to those younger or less experienced than he, I never saw him invest so much of his own energy, time, money and skill as when he volunteered to make a tiny batch of Pinot Noir discarded by the winery. Did he change because he was in control or because he was properly implicated in something he was making?

]]> http://wine-life.co.uk/news-review/wine-and-anarchy-winemaking-by-committee/feed 1 http://wine-life.co.uk/news-review/in-praise-of-natural-wines http://wine-life.co.uk/news-review/in-praise-of-natural-wines#comments Thu, 04 Aug 2011 00:29:15 +0000 Oliver Styles http://wine-life.co.uk/?p=1294 Yes, you read the headline correctly. But, before you all start the malicious ‘Benedict Arnold’, ‘Italian Army WWII’-style comments, let me set a few things straight by saying that I maintain deep misgivings about the Natural Wine fad and about its meaningfulness (or lack thereof). Indeed, Andrew Jefford wrote a relatively decent piece recently saying that Natural Winemakers should beware dogma but I think he never quite made it to the point that I’ve been making for so long: that dogma is answer and the problem. Isabelle Legeron MW, a Natural Wine proponent known as ‘that crazy French woman‘, is right to say that:

Wine started life a simple commodity but it has now been hijacked by fashion and consumerism. Natural wines are a nostalgic snapshot of what wine was like before hi-tech got involved.

Without a dogma or a set of rules, however, Natural Wine will be easily hijacked itself by any Tom, Dick or Henri wanting to ride the bandwagon. But at the same time, as Jefford states, this dogma is getting in the way of making good wine. Catch-22? For me, yes.

But onto the more positive stuff. A couple of weeks ago, I sat under a blustery French sky with a good friend drinking a bottle of Carbonically Macerated Corbières that was probably the most interesting wine I’ve had all year. Nothing like the brutal, tannic monsters of its region (it probably shouldn’t have even got the right to call itself Corbières, but what the hell), we drank nearly the whole bottle with nothing but pleasure and interest. Now, I’m not sure whether the Carbonic Maceration process has anything ‘natural’ about it but it was bought from a Natural Wine shop in Paris.

Now, doubters can scoff – as I do – at this point: a Carbonically Macerated wine in a Natural Wine shop is bit like a Rocker and his motorbike in the middle of a Mod scooter trip to Brighton. It just ain’t right. But you can’t take away from the fact that it was delicious and different. My friend, who works in the wine industry in France, said that there, like the UK or even the USA, lots of people (and especially the younger demographic) love the concept of Natural Wines.

‘I went to a Natural Wine bar in the south the other day,’ he said. ‘It was full. Full of young people.’

And I have to admit that, like a grand old spinster aunt candidly sharing tales of sexual misadventure with her niece, I felt a surge of warmth and compassion – happy that the world of wine was not old and redundant.

Thank God for Natural Wine, I thought, being as it is that all I ever hear about on the news or in the pages of wine magazines is blue-chip Bordeaux, luxury wines and prestige cuvées. I’ve written before – numerous times on this website – that the likes of top Bordeaux are very much in danger of losing touch with their future drinkers if not losing touch with the majority of wine drinkers outright. With all this talk of luxury, of the likes of Château d’Yquem being ‘unique, exceptional, a magic wine that makes one dream more than the others, and a dream has no price‘ (which is rubbish really because in the case of Yquem 1811 the dream costs precisely €85,000), about how much LVMH’s sales continue to grow, and about the soaring prices of these objects, how can you expect the majority of your consumer base (viz. those that aren’t in investment banking) to care?

The world of blue-chip Bordeaux and ‘luxury’ wines is, I believe, about as appealing as the sight of Dominique Strauss-Kahn in his underpants.

Even the Bordelais are beginning to realise it. In what must be one of the most heavily ironic – if not downright outrageous – news articles I’ve read this year, two young Moueix’s (yes, they of the famous Bordeaux clan) bemoaned the dangers of ‘losing touch’ with the younger generation.

It wasn’t just ironic that, in saying ‘the danger [was] in top chateaux charging prices that only billionnaires can afford’, they could just as easily be referring to the elder members of their own family – one also wonders how much ‘connection to the traditional markets’ they will get when the youth of France see two very well-off guys posing in flash clothing.

Compare that to the (admittedly) whimsical image of the unshorn, often hirsute Natural winemaker in his or her element (they are often pictured, soft focus, in the vines or standing in the middle of a diabolically disorganised winery).

Idealogically, I think Natural Wine has already won the battle the young Moueix’s are talking about. It has deservedly taken ground from the luxury wine market and will continue to do so unless the likes of the top Bordeaux make a radical shift in their pricing and image strategy. And I think we all know that will only happen when a cold front rips through hell, or we all decide we’ve had enough and vote Anarchist.

And while I’m patiently waiting for that to happen, and while I still maintain Natural wine is as much about consumerism as its antecedents, it’s hats off to the movement for restoring an old spinster’s faith in the future of wine.

]]> http://wine-life.co.uk/news-review/in-praise-of-natural-wines/feed 10 http://wine-life.co.uk/news-review/bordeaux-en-primeur-why-wine-critics-think-youre-dumb http://wine-life.co.uk/news-review/bordeaux-en-primeur-why-wine-critics-think-youre-dumb#comments Mon, 01 Aug 2011 10:56:12 +0000 Oliver Styles http://wine-life.co.uk/?p=1265 [This post comes partly as a response to Simon O'Hare's comments on my previous post, partly as an update of thoughts. I want to challenge the notion that En Primeur ratings do not need to include a price and to ask readers to take action with the critics if they feel (as I do) that the En Primeur system, as it stands, is flawed. This is a long piece so I've added sub headings for skipping ease in case one section gets boring.]

Tasting En Primeur

[This blog starts by attempting to address the issue of how people - not just Neal Martin, I must point out - taste En Primeur.]

… If Neal Martin adheres to Parker’s main maxim on the issue of how one tastes (viz. you have to rate the wine as it is before you) then there should be little consideration of the wine’s future development and no consideration as to its producer or its history.

To quote Parker himself:

Judgments ought to be made solely on the basis of the product in the bottle, not the pedigree, the price, the rarity, or one’s like or dislike of the producer.

Parker might think judgements ‘ought to’ be made in this way, but they rarely are (how he or Martin taste En Primeur is for them to tell us – of which more later). To say that the majority of tasters at En Primeur taste what is before them would, I think, be a misrepresentation of what goes on in Bordeaux during the Spring months.

Tasters peering into crystal balls when they give you their tasting notes is almost unavoidable when it comes to En Primeur. Mainly because saying ‘this wine doesn’t taste great now’ is of no service to anyone but historical record. The consumer can do little with this information as it is entirely possible that the wine will taste great once it is bottled, and, if not, that it will taste great in 20 years’ time. Thus while no one can fault a taster for giving 13 out of 20 to Château Lafite or Haut-Brion because it tastes like the rear end of a dog at the time of tasting, they will be ridiculed if, in 20 months’ or 20 years’ time, it tastes great.

Wine tasters know that this is true with some wines (Château Montrose was notoriously ‘tight’ for much of it’s early life) and that other, great wines, can sometimes show badly early on. Thus to avoid ridicule in front of their peers (a group that doesn’t need any encouragement to belittle their brothers), many wine tasters at En Primeur will (a) not taste blind (although it is impossible to taste any of the ‘blue-chip’ wines blind) and/or (b) adjust their scores (consciously or unconsciously) when they know what they are dealing with. A few brave souls taste as many En Primeur wines as they can blind – and stick to their scores. It avails them of very little.

Thus ‘pedigree’ counts just as much – if not more – when wine tasters assess wines at En Primeur. Château Haut Tour Mouton might taste rubbish now but if it’s a Premier Cru Classé or it has been producing great wine since its current owner (a large multinational bank) took over, the likelihood is the score will have very little to do with how it tastes at this very moment.

To which you might ask me: ‘what’s the point?’. To which my answer is: ‘quite’.

Are you a fool if you don’t like Bordeaux?

One thing that also annoys me greatly is that pretty much everyone who writes, publishes and makes any kind of judgement at the Bordeaux barrel tastings believes that people who don’t buy Bordeaux at En Primeur are basically stupid. In fact, they think that if you buy any wine other than Bordeaux you (yes, you) lack the mental capacity to make value judgements when it comes to wine.

I should explain. Critics nowadays are being asked if it is not a problem that they – the consumer champions – are giving scores during En Primeur to wines that have neither been priced nor released (this generally happens a month or so later). The oft-used reply is that this is not a problem because when the prices come out, the consumer can make a judgement on what he or she can afford and what he or she wants, based on the review and the price.

But surely if this were true it would be needless for said critics to publish any prices whatsoever, be the wine from Bordeaux or Piedmont. In fact, why are they bothering to give you ‘good value’ wines or good ‘QPR’ (Quality Price Ratio) bottles if they already believe we can make our own minds up about value. Maybe they should stop patronising us?

Or, if they don’t make value judgements when it comes to Bordeaux En Primeur, does that mean they think people who buy Bordeaux En Primeur are somehow more educated, more sensible, more intelligent than someone who dithers between a Picpoul de Pinet and a New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc? Is that the point? Are people who like Claret more intelligent? Is En Primeur only for the educated? Is it that if you want to buy wines from any other region than Bordeaux, wine critics think you’re practically incapable of wiping your own bottom because it’s only in Bordeaux that they believe you can use your brain and make up your mind without guidance? Is this – dare I say it – ‘snobbish’ on their part?

Vintage variation

Another aspect of En Primeur that goes very much unmentioned by everyone who publishes their scores is the vintage difference of said scores. Let me put it this way: is 92pts for a 2009 Bordeaux the same as 92pts for a 2007? Does the scale slide depending on the greatness of the vintage? Is it like exam results in that the top 20% is an A grade, regardless of content? I know of one respected taster who admits that 18/20 in one year is not necessarily the same level as 18/20 in another.

I frequently lambast the entire En Primeur circus at the level of the Bordeaux châteaux and their business channels but I also wonder if it is also time to ask of every taster some very pertinent questions.

Ask them all openly and make them all respond (or shame on them). After all, they are meant to be our champions and, while the likes of Robert Parker might hesitate to ‘collude’ with other journalists in refraining from publishing his scores until prices are released, there is no excuse for not responding to legitimate queries from the consumers they are meant to represent.

Email your critic

Copy and paste the lower section and send it to any taster whose scores you follow at En Primeur:

1. When tasting wines En Primeur are your ratings purely reflective of the sample before you, irrespective of which chateau it came from, who made it, what its history is and what the vintage is? Do you believe it is possible to taste this way at En Primeur?

2. Do you always try to taste the wines blind? [Understanding, obviously, that top Chateaux do not permit wines to be tasted blind]

3. If you answered yes to the first question but no to the second, please explain your position. Answers along the lines of ‘I am not swayed by labels’ will not do.

4. Are your ratings consistent year-on-year, irrespective of vintage style, etc (i.e. is a 90pt wine in 2007 of the same quality as a 90pt wine in 2009)? If you answered ‘yes’ to question 1, it is assumed the answer to this question is also ‘yes’.

5. Why do you allow your wine ratings to be published before you know the price of what you are assessing?

6. Would you rather publish all your wine reviews without mentioning any prices? (In other words, do you believe your personal assessment of good/bad value wine is pointless and of no use?)

7.a Do you think that creating demand before a wine has been given a price favours the producer over the consumer?

7.b. Conversely, do you think that giving a bad mark to a wine before you know its price is unfair to the producer?

8. Do you believe the En Primeur system, as it stands, is the best possible method of selling Bordeaux wines to the consumer? Why?

9. Do you – or would you prefer to – taste all the En Primeur wines in the same way (i.e. all at the château itself)?

10. If you could change one thing about En Primeur, what would it be?0.

]]> http://wine-life.co.uk/news-review/bordeaux-en-primeur-why-wine-critics-think-youre-dumb/feed 1