Writing About Wine: Professionals

In This issue: Wine journalism and the impact of the Internet.

The Web has changed the way wines are reviewed and scored. Everyone can blog about wine these days. Wineries and professional writers are learning to adapt to the changes with new marketing ideas.

The Internet has revolutionized the flow of information about wine. The number of professional wine journalists (people paid to write about wine) has increased in printed media. Formerly limited to newspapers and magazines, the Internet has expanded both fame and readership for a number of wine critics. However, the information in many of these sites is available only by subscription. 

Before wines from one vintage are completely sold out, the wines from the next vintage are usually on the pipeline. Keeping up with so many wines throughout multiple vintages involves a lot of study, expense and time. It is extremely difficult and expensive for professionals to keep tasting and re-tasting wines over and over again in a manner that makes economic sense to their publications. By the time the information is organized and edited for print, it is almost obsolete. This has forced change on the traditional way of writing and communicating scores.

Before Robert Parker started publishing the Wine Advocate, most wine journalism about Bordeaux wines was performed by writers in Europe. It was common practice for many of those writers to receive free bottles of the wines to be reviewed, usually by the case. Let’s remember that some of these top wines were selling for under 10 USD at the time. This practice allowed for wines to be tasted as they aged. As these wines increased in price, the practice became suspect of influencing reviews. If wines were not rated highly one vintage, samples were not shipped for the next vintage. Newspapers and magazines had no budget to purchase all the wines and many writers were not being paid enough to purchase the wines by themselves. Wine writers depended on the wineries to send samples for review, so the reviews needed to be positive.

When Robert Parker started his publication, he was quick to state that, in order to keep impartiality, he would only review wines that he had purchased. An attorney by training, he wanted to eliminate any conflict of interest associated with the free wine samples.

It has been suggested in some recent blogs that it would now seem impossible for one person, or an organization, to purchase and taste so many wines year after year without some support from the wineries, especially in the form of samples. Sometimes Robert Parker’s Wine Advocate Magazine will state that a particular wine was not submitted for tasting, and so, it was not reviewed. He is obviously not purchasing all wines.

I believe that the standards Robert Parker and other reviewers imposed on themselves helped to increase the trustworthiness of wine reviews. Recent criticism of apparent changes in tasting samples policy doesn’t take into account the drastic changes in wine marketing.

Now, more than ever, wine reviews have a strong influence in the marketability of wines and wineries have changed the way they interact with wine journalists. Many wineries admit to trying to do everything possible to attain good reviews for their wines and some of them will try their best to attract as many journalists as possible. The days of shipping free wine samples are over, though.

It is very common for wine journalists to travel to wine regions and taste wines in large numbers at one time. Tasting from fifty to a hundred wines in a period of a few hours is not uncommon. Having established relationships with winery owners and merchants for many years, winery associations and/or negociants arrange the collection of samples and delivery to a tasting location to coincide with the press visit. This way, a large number of wines can be tasted at the same time.

In some New World wine regions the number of wineries has doubled in the last 10 years. It would be impossible to visit all wineries, to arrange acquiring tasting samples individually, whether purchased or free. We, the public, benefit from information regarding new wineries, if they were not discovered by wine journalists at one of these mammoth tastings.

Tastings are also conducted at the offices of some wine publications. The logistics of acquiring the wines are very complicated since shipping regulations, costs, release dates and other details can vary widely from one region to another. Wines must be stored and catalogued and be ready by the time the tasting is scheduled. Wines are either purchased or sent as samples.

Some people still believe that the only way wine critics and their publications can remain impartial is if they purchase all the wines they review. I don’t see how this could be possible with today’s prices and the number of wines available. The expense of these wines is usually covered by the marketing budget of the wineries, or their import agent; something that was not available before Robert Parker and the Wine Spectator came along. Frankly, some of the most expensive wines owe the public the information that journalists can disseminate about their wines. They should provide samples, as most of them do.

Making wine available for tasting is not only prudent, it is the only way many wines will reach a busy journalist with a tight publication deadline. Not all wineries, even famous ones, send wines for review every year. This could be because the wine was not available at the time, or production was too small. Sometimes they refuse to be reviewed at all.

In the case of publications that sell advertising to wineries; are they unfairly giving higher scores those who advertise? It doesn’t seem to be that way. Would giving a higher score to a mediocre wine help to increase the circulation of the magazine? Not likely. Consider also, for example, that by the time the Wine Spectator publishes their  Top 100 wines of the year list, most of the wines from that vintage are already sold out at the winery. Why would anyone want to pay for a review of a wine that is no longer available? The value of these rankings have more to do with a general approval of a region, style, or vintage.

Also consider that selling wine magazines is not a great business in itself. In the case of the Wine Spectator, for example, their other magazine, Cigar Aficionado, sells many more copies and advertising than the Wine Spectator, helping to keep the publisher afloat. There aren’t more producers and brands of cigars than wines. The logistics of keeping information current about wines is many times more expensive and complex than anything you could ever find to say about cigars, yet the cigar magazine can sell more issues because there is less competition in that category.

Wine journalist do seem to have a larger influence is in the pricing of futures of Bordeaux. These reviews are conducted from wines still in barrel. The only way to taste these wines is by going to the wine region or the winery itself and the tastings are organized by the winery for all members of the trade, including journalists. Even though the release prices are indeed decided by the influence of the reviews, a correlation between free sampling and the review is hard to prove.

Professional wine journalism is not a highly remunerated job. The expense of repeated frequent travel to wine regions, the logistics to arrange for samples (purchased or not), the scheduling of tasting followed by writing on a deadline are complicated by salaries which many writers manage to combine with some other complementary activities: writing books, publishing in multiple media or selling syndicated articles, speaking fees and teaching seminars, consulting for restaurants, and the like. If wine journalists had to spend time finding and organizing the acquisition of wines from all over the world, how much time would there be for tasting and writing?

The expectation of the public is of the highest standards of honesty and consistency in subjective of opinions reached by the experience of tasting wines for many years. I would hope that writers could review as many wines as possible with as much impartiality as possible. Requiring or expecting the journalist to cover all costs is unrealistic and impractical.

Think of the major wine magazines in English: Wine Spectator, Decanter, Wine Enthusiast, etc., neither of them has become an all inclusive reference of wines from all regions. There are limitations to the amount of information that can be processed for publication or that readers will want to pay for.

The Internet helps to fill the gap between the published publications and the massive amount of wines available for sale. The consumers can help to keep information current, locally relevant and even seasonally updated.

If you are a wine lover, I encourage you to share your opinions about the wines you drink. You can help to enrich the free flow of information about good wine and food. Next time I will write about qualities that make a good wine enthusiast and how to write about wine.