No Shit! - Why Scores Matter to Wine
I really shouldn’t need to write this post. But then, nobody should need to tell the President of the United States that vaccines and Tylenol don’t cause autism, and that climate change isn’t a hoax. Nor should anybody need to inform the attendees of Flat Earth Conventions that they’re wasting their time
.But the announcement by Michelin that they are to start rating wines - along with a picture I posted on LinkedIn of a wallful of Wine Spectator high-scorers in a New York store - has reignited the argument over scores and medals.
Some people seem to believe that scores don’t help sell wine. Or if they do, they shouldn’t.
Others want to pretend that scores have ‘had their day’.
This is nonsense.
Since the 1980s, scores, medals and recommendations from critics have been crucially instrumental in giving people confidence to buy and try unfamiliar wines.
They don’t infallibly help sell all wine everywhere, but they work well enough for producers to continue sending samples to magazines, critics, and competitions, and for them to print good results on stickers that retailers can also use in point-of-sale displays. The stickers have another, little-discussed, benefit: at least one highly respected critic I know derives a significant part of their income from selling them to wineries whose wines they have liked.
Scores are also sufficiently effective for wine merchants to use them when promoting fine and investible wine, and for publications like The Wine Spectator, the Wine Enthusiast, Decanter, World of Wine Wine, a long list of newsletters and online platforms including the Wine Advocate, and now its owners, Michelin, all to think it’s worth using them.
Parker’s point
Robert Parker’s ultra-American, ‘anyone-can-be-president’ philosophy was the welcome corrective to Europe’s ‘born-to-greatness’, 1855 Classificationist, attitude that cast producers in Calabria, Corbieres and Castilla la Mancha as dwellers in the vinous slums. Without scores, as superstar Argentine producer Laura Catena, acknowledged to me, the best wines from her country would never have achieved their international success. The same applies, of course, to Argentina’s Andean neighbour, Chile which gained enormously from Eduardo Chadwick’s ‘Judgment of Berlin’ initiative, the results of which did, of course, depend on a panel of people like me scoring wines like Lafite, Latour and Seña.
