Potholes on the Path to Wine Enlightenment

You could write a Zen koan about the wonky, occasionally nonsensical wine topic that is wine criticism and blind tasting versus context-based (i.e. non-blind) tasting.

The path to enlightenment, in my opinion, is neither.

First, some background.

I’ve read both editions of The Wine Trials by Robin Goldstein and I’ve read several articles and blog posts about the book, as well.  The book is fine for what it is; what it’s not, however, is a genuine truth-seeking manifesto that should be taken as an article of faith.

The main premise of the book is to instill a sense of confidence in wine consumers to trust their palate, while puncturing the notion that a wine has to be expensive to be good. In doing so, the book slaughters just about every sacred cow there is in the world of wine and comes to the conclusion, via blind tasting, that (perhaps symbolically more than empirically), inexpensive wines under $15 best expensive wines that cost from $50 to $150.  The book goes on to present 150 wines (with at least 20,000 cases of production) that won The Wine Trials blind tasting bake-off.

A couple of issues:  First, the most fundamental flaw is that the premise of the book isn’t a fully fledged dissertation and assault on wine convention using junk science.  It’s partly that, but the book exists to tell consumers the wines under $15 that won in blind tastings.

Make no mistake—the core premise of this book is to conduct these wine trials every year and sell you a book … every year.  So, consumers need to look at this with a level of dubiousness when the author does a drive-by shooting of wine critics and the 100 point system, only to further an agenda that lines his own pockets.

The second significant issue is the book doesn’t list the “expensive” wines that these under $15 wines bested.  How is a consumer supposed to trust the blind tasting results when they don’t know what wines were in the opposing category, or really how they were chosen?

The methodology of this book is significantly flawed and designed to appeal to people that know enough about wine, but not too much.  You get the sense that the first 58 pages of the book are designed to lull consumers into a comfort womb; “Yes, the authors are crusaders for the truth,” and hopefully nobody asks any questions.

This brings me to the other ongoing topic that I believe is largely noisiness intended to perpetuate the empirical correctness of wine critics – blind tasting.

In the comments at Steve Heimoff’s site earlier this week, there was a lengthy going back and forth amongst four professional wine critics.

The dialogue centered on blind tasting with the prevailing thought being that blind tasting a wine provides the reviewer with the most objective analysis of a wine, absent bias.

There’s not much to argue with that point because it’s mostly true.  However, one has to wonder if this ongoing “blind tasting” conversation that seems to repeat itself ad nauseum isn’t a subtle policy play and a reach around back pat.

A bigger question to me is does anybody care? 

Going back to our Zen koan, “Two hands clap and there is a sound. What is the sound of one hand?”

The reality is that consumer-generated wine reviews are growing SIGNIFICANTLY. The other reality is that virtually no consumer-generated reviews are done blind.

If professional wine critics continue to stump on the pulpit about blind tasting (and they do it long and loud enough) they continue to create a line of demarcation for their work relative to the unwashed masses.

That’s fine, if that’s the case.  But, here’s the thing:  It doesn’t matter.  Not only do few people truly care, but information is moving to a level of transparency where context in totality matters … a lot.

A couple of thoughts:

I have long felt that individual wine reviews missed the boat a little bit.  If you look at wine truly through the filter of the average wine consumer, they predominately don’t buy individual wines based on a review.  Now, many do, but that’s at the very upper-end of the price spectrum.  For the vast majority of wine reviews, with general wine quality across the industry being top-notch, a good review is just a good review for an inexpensive wine.  If it’s used as a shelf talker maybe it moves the needle, otherwise it goes into the abyss of information.

Instead, I believe, what consumers do is scan reviews and build brand familiarity.  “I may not be sure if it’s the Riesling or Cabernet from Chateau St. Michelle that was supposed to be good, but I’ll pick up the wine I have in my hand regardless,” goes the thinking.

I will do an entirely separate post on this topic related to the social science of consumer choice and risk mitigation, but suffice to say there’s a lot of data that supports this.

Again, to me, what the majority of reviewing activity is good for is creating a level of mental stickiness about THE WINERY in the consumer’s memory bank, not an individual wine.

Given this thought, you might wonder why more people don’t review wineries en total – as in, “Beringer, across their line-up, produces the most consistent quality wines under $15 based on the following individual reviews.”  This is a much more useful way to do things instead of on a one-off basis.  Consumers have demonstrated a limited capacity to remember individual things, but they remember brands.

In addition to this, we are seeing twin movements that also play into this “winery as a total entity” notion.

Yelp, a retail-oriented, consumer generated review site, is growing at a very fast pace.  It’s growing so significantly that VinoVisit and Cork’d have created a strategic alliance for consumer-generated content that will now include visitor reviews—a subtle pick-up from the Yelp business model (the Yelp site already includes a significant number of California winery reviews).

Simply, customer service and the tasting room is the new “review” frontier and no longer is a good (or bad) experience relegated to word of mouth.  Now it’s a broadcast message.

Finally, Wal-Mart has been working on their “Sustainability Index.”  Similar to my mention of wine reviews, brands and mental stickiness, I could create an entire post on this Wal-Mart index, as well.

Suffice to say that they are creating a visual and/or numeric index that will be displayed with each product (including wine) that grades companies on their commitment and support of green practices.  It’s expected that other retailers will adopt this methodology, as well.

So, a winery is graded for their wine(s), their on-premise customer service, and, very shortly, their support of green and sustainable business practices.

My point here is that blind tasting is really a great topic, as is skewering the conventions of wine criticism – it makes for endless fun.  But, this is a topic that wouldn’t have been widely discussed six or seven years ago, and it’s not a topic that will be discussed six or seven years in the future. The ship has sailed and those that are interested in true wine enlightenment will soon see a winery at 360 degrees – quality across their wine line-up from consumer reviews in aggregate (as well as professional critics), their customer service in the form of a star rating, and how they conduct their business in the form of sustainability – likely delivered as a score.

So, while I can indulge today’s give and take about wine critics and blind tasting, it seems to me that the smart people are figuring out a meta-analysis that takes all of this content into a usable form that measures a winery across all of the categories that are emerging.

For those that get fired up about critics and scores, the bottom line isn’t far away, but this time it’ll be the so-called triple bottom line that measures a winery far more holistically, comprehensively and transparently then what we have today, and it won’t be blind, nor will it have to be.