AnuvaBlog

The LA Times reported today that:

“Only 10% in a four-year study of California State Fair judging were able to consistently give the same rating, or something close, to the same wine sampled multiple times in a large blind tasting.”

Click here for the full article

This is not at all surprising to me since I have quite often seen the variance in opinion in person, of wine judges and consumers alike. Why is this surprising to anyone else?

I suppose when someone adorns the title of Judge or simply writes something down on a piece of paper or puts it on Television, it becomes truth.  It never ceases to amaze me how many people put their blind faith in whatever they read, no matter where it comes from, and no matter what they see on TV.

I think it is much the same with wine even though, in my opinion, it is one of the hardest things to judge in the world for several reasons: people and their palates evolve and change and wine itself evolves and changes over time. The food and drink that I liked when I was 8 years old were very different than what I liked at 18 and then at 28. I didn’t even start liking wine till I was 24. My dad didn’t start liking wine till he was 55!!

Also, it is a myth that they always get better over time. Most wines cannot survive ideal storage conditions for more than about 5 years. Only very high quality wines continue to improve over long time horizons. But all wines change over time in the bottle.

So when this article refers to tasting the same wine at different competitions, does it mean an hour later or a month later? Because either way, if the wine has been exposed to oxygen for that amount of time longer it will have at least changed somewhat if not dramatically.

With such room for error within the person judging and the wine judged, how can anyone really be expected to be that consistent.

As many of you may have read in the news last week, Wine Spectator has gotten caught with their pants down a bit. Pretty much at their ankles.

Robin Goldstein, author of The Wine Trials–a book that critiques the wine industry’s own methods of wine criticism, publicity, ratings, advertising and pricing–sent in an entry to apply for Wine Spectator’s “award for excellence” for restaurants and his Osteria L’Intrepido restaurant in Milan, Italy won.

The enormous, gargantuan problem with this, however, is that his restaurant does not exist. Oops!

Besides the obvious problem of not doing their homework–and perhaps worse than giving an award to a restaurant that doesn’t exist–is the fact that Wine Spectator itself had berated many of the wines that Goldstein put on his phantom list. I quote the Chicago Tribune article: “[the wine list includes the] 1993 Amarone Classico Gioe S. Sofia, which the magazine once likened to ‘paint thinner and nail varnish.’” Another wine that was included on the list was described by Wine Spectator as “earthy, swampy, gamy, harsh and tannic. ” So not only does Wine Spectator give out bogus awards, but they give awards to wines lists that include wines for which they have given terrible reviews. Oops squared.

As if that weren’t enough, Wine Spectator charges each applicant a $250 fee to “apply” for the award. They get roughly 4500 applicants per year. Let’s do the math: 4500 x 250 = 1.125 million dollars.

So let me get this straight, ostensibly the most prestigious, auspicious and well-known wine publication in the world not only gives out awards to entities that do not exist but they clearly do not check to see if those entities carry products that they have already declared in print to be inferior, flawed or distasteful and at the same time they make millions of dollars doing it?

What is unnerving to me is that our new publicist and I wanted desperately to find a way to put our product into WS. How can I now, as the sole full-time defender of my product, consciously make the decision to go after publicity in WS? The answer is that I cannot.

For the last several years the Hyatt hotel in Mendoza has put on the Hyatt Wine Awards event in July in order to facilitate the export and production of high end wines from Argentina. We are please to say that as a minimum 4 of our wines won  gold or silver medals: Reserva Cavagnaro Malbec, Sin Fin Malbec, Beviam Syrah, and Las Perdices Don Juan.

This is very exciting for us considering that our members are the only people that are getting these wines outside of Argentina.

Would it be presumptive to assume that our PR department will do a press release about this recent, er, press? Surely not.