Accumulate experience and selecting a good bottle is not so hard. The hits far outweigh the misses which confirms your skills. Though do you ever ask why the same wine will be pronounced average by an experienced consumer in another State?
Comparing the capital city show judging results from 2023, a big effort from brother Richard, highlights the confusion of seasoned professionals. Awarding a gold at one city show while the next does not think it worthy of a bronze cannot be shrugged off. This has been noted for decades yet I wonder if you understand the implications.
Wine is about growing and harvesting, next the winemaking, and lastly the selling though an addition over the last 50 years has seen the arrival of our own ‘fourth estate’. Instead of leaving the selecting to customers a group of wine obsessives, ever-expanding in number, arrived to bring order to what they saw as dis-order.
I term them Linnaean classifiers after the famed taxonomist. Every wine will be catalogued, given a subjective view of quality, and assigned a level in the invented hierarchy. All to enhance personal status, the obsessive now being called a wine expert, which may lead to an income.
Looking back, I agree some order and advice was helpful, perhaps till 1980, when the potential for control became understood so now, we have price consequences that are breathtaking.
I like to think after you discovered Glug you found a small group with the simple belief that quality drinking appears from around $14 as seen with Crayford Barossa Valley Shiraz 2021 and Goat Square Barossa Valley Cabernet Sauvignon 2021 and after say $40 the prices are invented.
I’ll illustrate my point with a geological story. When I studied geology the cabinets full of the world’s minerals had to be memorised and so to the fossils. Our lecturers tried hard to awaken our curiosity, yet they knew, and we kind of knew, something was missing. Real science was chemistry and physics while even biology ranked above geology after Watson and Crick cracked the DNA. Geology changed with a series of papers published in rapid succession from 1965. By 1967 the big breakthrough was over, and plate tectonics finally made geology a science.
To take a glass of wine and erect a pretend scientific like hierarchy of all the worlds wines, imagining this structure is significant, like that of the biologist Carl Linnaeus, is hubris and surely not helpful to the common-sense drinker. Does anyone really believe wineries can be graded, and the wines they make further graded, all controlled by a select few that elevate themselves to the modest status of master.
Wine books, atlases and compendiums with detailed instructions have sent our youth off to the cocktail bar where bright colours, and the punch of alcohol turns out to be far more fun.
News this week confirms the worst. Marvin Shanken the owner-editor of Wine Spectator U.S., for a time the most influential of all magazines, has not reviewed the famed first growths chateaux of Bordeaux since 2020. Why, because the chateaux prices are so high any review or score they cannot control, think 98/100 to 100/100, could cost them millions and degrade their over-all worth.
Shanken said, ‘They used to send us their wines, but now they want us to go to the château to taste their wines, and we tell them we can’t do that because we wouldn’t be tasting blind…..Wine Spectator would love to taste the first-growths of Bordeaux. However, the magazine’s position is clear and unchanged. After over 40 years, we’re not going to start to taste wines non-blind. It’s just not going to happen’.
A praiseworthy comment by Shanken yet we have discussed the variability of masked tastings so why take the risk. The trade is now locked into the absurd game of proving to customers the wines are worth the inflated prices when judges can only give them what they want if wines are judged unmasked and by price. Now the game is paying the cost of entering 20 shows to hopefully win a gold.
Can you taste the greed and status I now find in many glasses of wine. Stick with your common-sense and have a few glasses most days of interesting wines like Three Hares No 2 Barossa Valley Mataro Grenache Shiraz 2020 and Fareham Estate Clare Valley Cabernet Sauvignon 2021.
So, Drink Widely Drink Well
David Farmer
P.S. We repeat on the Glug site ‘One of Australia’s most trusted and knowledgeable online wine retailers’ as said by Google. Go to www.glugwines.com.au for articles found nowhere else. While in Australian Wine Business Monthly, May-June 2024, you can read my thoughts ‘A Retailers View of the Current Wine Crisis’. Email david@glug.com.au if you would like a copy.
