Crying uncle

Once more, I allowed myself the masochistic enjoyment of entering into a debate about wine evaluations and ratings. Each time I get into one of these debates is always scheduled to be my last, but for some reason I can’t stay away. It’s possible that I am guilty of the identical trait that I level against wine critics: hubris.

This is the issue in a nutshell: wine critics claim generally that experience is far more important than knowledge; I claim that without knowledge, experience is only as important as the lessons learned from it.

What critics mean is that if you have many years of experience tasting and consuming wine, then you have enough information to make quality assessments concerning wine.

My claim is that in order to assess quality you first need established standards and then you need to be trained in identifying them. It’s simply not enough to have been tasting wine for some time.

About tasting wine, most critics claim to taste wine blind, but do they?

Sure, most reputable critics taste wine without knowing who produced it, but they also taste the wine knowing what it is: a Chardonnay, a Pinot Noir, etc. That’s hardly a blind tasting.

Perception often gets in the way of an assessment. If you know you are tasting Chardonnay your brain will seek those traits in a Chardonnay that you have come to know through experience, but your brain may also overlook those traits in the wine that detract from its varietal characteristics—or, your brain may simply fabricate the traits that it expects should be there but may not be there.

We taste with our senses, but we make decisions with our brain.

Remove advance perception (hints) and people’s tastes mechanisms become confused. The trained, knowledgeable taster picks up the hints on his or her own. If you can’t find Chardonnay traits in the wine, it’s either you or the wine at fault; there are ways to find out which.

The other problem with wine criticism is its insistence on working from a purely subjective base and then passing it off on the consumer as if it were an objective result—in the form of a score. When you look into the scoring system and what each number means you find that the numbers are tied to vague concepts of quality that cannot be duplicated consistently among tasters. This situation is tested when a truly blind tasting includes multiple tastes of the same wine yet produces a wide variance in results.

The reason for this problem is that assigning a number to a concept says absolutely nothing about the thing being evaluated. The emphasis is on the person doing the evaluation.

I both blame and understand the wine industry for the situation in wine criticism. On one hand, the industry hasn’t decided definitively what constitutes wine quality or if it has, it doesn’t seem to be telling anyone. On the other hand, having a volume of favorable opinions floating around has opened up a marketing tool for wineries (many critics no longer report on the wines that they hate).

Whenever these debates get going, someone is sure to say that if I were to win the argument, I’d be taking the soul and enjoyment out of wine by making the quality assessment technical. It’s a specious and diversionary accusation. Critics can’t have it both ways: are wine evaluations about quality or are they about enjoyment? Quality standards can be measured; enjoyment is a nebulous concept that changes from person to person.

If wine critics care about credibility then they should gladly embrace establishing a universal evaluation system instead of a calibrate-to-my-fabulous-palate system.

Still, I’m so overwhelmed by this subject and my inability to persuade the critics that I have decided to join them. That’s right: I’m crying uncle and becoming a wine critic, and here’s my system.

First, noticing that wine rating systems have inflated over the decades anywhere from a 10 to a 100 point scale, I’ve devised the ultimate scale: 200 points.

Second, since I already know that I am evaluating wine, and every wine that I evaluate will claim to be wine, in my system every wine starts with 100 points for being what it says it is.

Third, my system is so simplified that you the consumer don’t even have to wonder about my talent, experience, knowledge or anything else. If I don’t like a wine, it receives 101 points. If I like it, it receives 200 points—end of story.

If you agree with my score, then we are calibrated.

If you don’t agree with my score, what’s wrong with you? This stuff is quality.

Geez, wake up fellah! Have you as much experience as I have?

Happy Thanksgiving—I’ll return soon after this holiday fades into the past.

If you are reading this entry anywhere other than on the vinofictions blog, be aware that it has been lifted without my permission (and without recompense), and that’s a copyright infringement, no matter that the copyright information appears with it.

Copyright Thomas Pellechia
November 2009. All rights reserved.

Shocked, shocked!

Patient: “Doctor, doctor, Claude Rains is in my brains or at least one of his characters is. All day long for the past week my mind has repeated over and over, ‘I’m shocked to learn that people cheat!’”

Doctor: “That’s probably because people do cheat and also because you’ve been told this over and over. When was the last time that you remember someone telling you that people cheat?”

Patient: “Hmm. All this past week.”

1. Decanter magazine reported that an Australian wine writer has written wine tasting notes without ever having tasted the wines. Skinner

2. The Wall Street Journal reported that critics and wine reviewers are just like the rest of us—none of us can accurately reproduce our own tasting notes and ratings. WSJ

3. A Rochester, NY news anchor outed a blatant attempt to pass off paid for advertising as free wine expertise. WHAM

4. The head of the Specialty Wine Retailer’s Association tells us that the Wine and Spirit Wholesalers repeat and repeat lies so that they can maintain their distribution monopoly.
Fermentation

Doctor: “Well, I can see why you might have had this recurring thought in your brain. It seems that much has been going on lately in the wine world—much crap, too.”

Patient: “Doc, it doesn’t bother me so much that there are cheats, mainly because I’ve known it and have been saying it for years to anyone who would listen. Although, I don’t call them cheats; I call it gaming the system, the system being that so many people have no security about their own palates and their own ability to seek out what they like in a wine that they have presented the charlatan class with a fantastic opening.”

Doctor: “Charlatan? Isn’t that a little strident?”

Patient: “OK, call them mountebanks instead. What should we call people who make voluble claims to skill or knowledge? Nice? Honest? Real? Friendly? Of course, there are other words to describe people paid for practicing deception…”

Doctor: “I’m sorry to interrupt, but your time is up. We’ll talk about this next time. Ok?”

Patient: “Sure. I’ve got to go anyway. I heard about a great deal on a Parker 95 that a retailer has on his shelf for a price that is too low to pass up, even if the 95 was issued for a previous vintage of that wine…”

Doctor: “Do you mean that retailers also cheat?”

Patient: “I didn’t say that. I don’t pay you to put words or anything else into my mouth.”

Doctor: “Oh, but you do. However, like a wine geek, you don’t like to face reality.”

Arguing again

If you are reading this entry anywhere other than on the vinofictions blog, be aware that it has been lifted without my permission (and without recompense), and that’s a copyright infringement, no matter that the copyright information appears with it.

Copyright Thomas Pellechia
November 2009. All rights reserved.

Snowflakes

Have you heard that every palate is a snowflake?

What a lovely sentiment; its meaning is, of course, that we have individual and unique palates.

Now aren’t we special.

Presumably, the snowflake concept tells us that wine is subjective and that what one person finds tasteful another may not. But it says even more than that. If no snowflake is alike, then the millions of wine consumers in this world account for millions of palates, and not one is like another therefore, talking about what you taste in a wine is akin to talking to yourself.

The problem with this snowflake concept is that many who say such things happen to also be people who make a living telling the rest of us what individual wines taste like or they are people who tell us what the wines they want to sell to us taste like. Really now, if every palate is a snowflake, then how can someone else's wine description possibly benefit the rest of us?

Maybe those who tell us what to taste in a wine do so because they are endowed with a universal snowflake decoder. Or maybe at birth they were given the gift of a snowflake that represents the entire blizzard. Or maybe the snowflake sentiment is disingenuous drivel.

My suggestion to wine reviewers: please, dispense with the metaphors. If we are the individual arbiters of our own taste, through our own palates, then it seems that you have some explaining to do concerning the benefit of your wine review.

On the other hand, if you truly believe that yours is the accurate and superior snowflake—just say so. That way, we’ll know that we should disregard our own sensory information and go by yours.

If you choose this route, would you consider shedding the number ratings and just get on with the lecture?

Snowflake or no snowflake, some of us are math as well as palate impaired.

If you are reading this entry anywhere other than on the vinofictions blog, be aware that it has been lifted without my permission (and without recompense), and that’s a copyright infringement, no matter that the copyright information appears with it.

Copyright Thomas Pellechia
November 2009. All rights reserved.

A True Wine Culture

Have you heard about the drop in interest in high-end wines because of the crummy economy—you have heard about the economy?

Think about it for a minute: the economy tanks and among the things that tanks with it are sales of wines that most of us can’t afford to drink regularly. What does that say about wine and about us?

Many of us find it easy to wax romantic over the notion that Europe is a wine culture, a place where families drink wine together everyday at meals, and although there’s evidence that things are changing in Europe, the wine culture thing has been true for quite some time. But what exactly do Europeans drink everyday?

It’s doubtful that most Europeans can afford a daily dose of Petrus, Giacosa, Pesquera, or the latest in Grosse Gewächse wines. No, that’s not the everyday wines of Europe. In fact, in every European country that I have visited, the everyday wines generally come pouring out of nondescript carafes or they are each country’s version of the Italian Vino Da Tavola; in other words, comparable to an American low-priced wine.

A true wine culture doesn’t talk about it all day, as many of us do. A true wine culture doesn’t spend its time searching for Nirvana in numbers. More important, a true wine culture doesn’t flee the product at the first sign of an economic downturn. That’s because in a true wine culture, there’s always a carafe nearby of solid, healthy wine either made by your father, your friend, or the family with the vineyard and winery down the road.

In a true wine culture, you don’t need labels, you don’t need age restrictions, you don’t need ratings, and you certainly don’t need 50 states with 500 separate regulations. In a true wine culture, you don’t need Wall Street to guide your wine drinking habits. And in a true wine culture, you should be able to get wine stamps with your food stamps!

Also, in a true wine culture, the lower cost products are a lot better than some of the plonk I’ve tasted lately because I can no longer afford the better stuff.

PS: I do wonder about the wine critics who tell us about those marvelous $30 and $40 bottles of wine for lunch. One for lunch and one for dinner everyday, and I’d be eating, er, drinking all my book sale profits, if I ever make any.

If you are reading this entry anywhere other than on the vinofictions blog, be aware that it has been lifted without my permission (and without recompense), and that’s a copyright infringement, no matter that the copyright information appears with it.

Copyright Thomas Pellechia
November 2009. All rights reserved.

Decant this

A literary agent once took a copy of a memoir proposal of mine and without saying anything about why or what he had done, he sent it back with a yellow mark over every appearance of the word “I.”

His message got through loudly and with painful clarity.

The agent provided me with a needed look into potential self-absorption on the theory that a good memoir is as much a good story as any novel, and although a memoir centers around one person, that person need not be the absolute center of the story.

Maybe wine critics and reviewers can use this lesson.

The other day my friend Mitch posted on a wine forum a piece published in Scientific American 2004; volume 291; issue 5. It was by Andrew L. Waterhouse, a professor in the department of viticulture and enology at the University of California at Davis. The piece concerned itself with decanting wine.

While Waterhouse laid out his rationale for decanting either red or white wine, the section Mitch quoted offered little in the way of scientific reasoning. Essentially, Waterhouse reiterated what many people believe: younger red wines benefit from decanting because they, “can be harsh or astringent if consumed directly after opening the bottle,” older reds may benefit from decanting because it “…leaves the sediment behind, yielding clean wine,” and whites don’t benefit from decanting because “…decanting actually results in a wine with much less of the aroma than the winemaker intended,” and “…because white wines contain fewer tannins and pigments, they don't produce the same quantity of sediments that red wines do.”

Nothing of what Waterhouse said isn’t true, but the blanket statements are so definite that it makes me ask: where’s the proof?

A brief conversation ensued on the forum and Mitch went on, as he often does, to post a few scientific excerpts—he is a scientist by training and occupation, and he is interested in the science behind the concept of decanting wine. More to the point, he’s trying to find out what happens to a wine when it is decanted and whether or not there is any way of knowing beforehand what the outcome of decanting will be.

Mitch got one truly long-winded response from a wine reviewer. This was when my agent entered my mind.

The approximate 1100-word response to Mitch’s exploration of decanting included numerous personal pronoun references but not one bit of scientific evidence either for or against decanting wine, which in effect renders it a rather long piece of opinion writing. Nothing new there with wine critic/reviewers, but it does leave me wondering if they can ever get out of their heads, even for just five minutes. There are times when the science behind wine is too baffling even for those who know the science, imagine what you are getting back from those who haven’t a clue but have volumes in opinions.

Here’s an idea for those interested in the affect decanting might have on wine:

Get four bottles of the same wine. Set a time for a blind tasting. One hour before the set time, open two bottles and let the wine sit in one bottle for an hour and pour the other bottle of wine into a decanter to sit for an hour. Five to ten minutes before the tasting, open a third bottle and pour wine into a glass. When the tasting time arrives, pour the first two wines into a glass each, open the fourth bottle and pour wine into a glass and have someone taste all four glasses of wine right away without telling that person what you are trying to find out.

Let the person tell you how each wine smells and tastes—nothing more.

Do the above experiment more than once with different red and white wines until you are certain that you know whether or not to decant wine in the future; either that, or don't bother decanting at all.

Ask Jamie Goode about decanting and see what you get back:

Ask Emile Peynaud about decanting and see what you get back:

Ask Ronald S. Jackson about decanting and see what you get back:
(go to page 566)

Whatever you do, don’t ask a wine reviewer or critic about decanting wine.

If you are reading this entry anywhere other than on the vinofictions blog, be aware that it has been lifted without my permission (and without recompense), and that’s a copyright infringement, no matter that the copyright information appears with it.

Copyright Thomas Pellechia
October 2009. All rights reserved.

Not a tweet--a squawk

OK, this blog post is all opinion, and in keeping with the subject matter, I call it “squawk,” as in crow noise or a loud, raspy tweet.

Certainly, all you wine blog readers and Tweeter-savvy have heard of Fledgling. You haven’t? Well, get over to Steve Heimoff’s blog (see link below).

Fledgling is Twitter’s new wine, to the tune of a $10,000 investment with Crushpad, the winemaker.

For those who may not know it, Crushpad is a so-called custom crush winemaking facility, which literally means that you pay them, tell them what you want, and they will make it for you. You are responsible for selling, advertising, marketing, and even designing the packaging for your wine—with their help, of course. This is the outfit that brought us Vayniac Cab, made for Gary Vaynerchuk—you’ve heard of him, haven’t you?

The people at Twitter say they got the idea to have a wine brand from employees at the company who also happen to be Crushpad customers.

Light bulbs flashed: if we can use Twitter, the latest gift from God, to network our new brand, we can make a killing.

Not exactly: Twitter claims that the wine is for charity, or at least $5 of its $20 price tag is. The charity is Room to Read.

Am I the only one who finds the incongruity behind the fact that a company that invented a way to pare inanities to 140 characters wants children to learn to read? Talk about newspeak?

I’m not sure yet if I even like Twitter, but I’m certainly getting tired of celebrity wines and networking schemes connected to wine brands. This is truly cheapening the soul of the product.

There’s a reason that only a choice number of people on this earth can offer beautiful wines to the rest of us—it has something to do with study, talent, and passion. What happens to all that when everyone is a virtual winemaker—worse, what happens to the wine when no one makes it except a committee?

I hate this whole idea. But the part in the interview that truly set me off is when Steve asked this question of Crushpad CEO and Prez, Michael Brill:

“What is the significance of this, beyond raising money for charity? I mean, Crushpad getting involved in social media. You’re already calling it “social winemaking.”

…and Brill answered:

“We’re all about getting people involved in the winemaking process and co-creating a product with the customer.”

If that isn’t the most asinine comment about wine that I’ve read in my whole career I don’t know what is. I just finished talking about what I think of winemaking by committee and from afar, and now this fellow talks about getting even more people involved in making wine. What a concept—a reality show that isn't on TV!

All right, so Crushpad was a good idea to capitalize from those who love wine, want to make their own, but haven’t the stones (and I don’t mean Biz Stone) or money—or both—to go out and do it, you know, like grow grapes, press them, ferment them, nurse the wine, bottle it, and deal with every supplier, bureaucrat and annoyance that comes between the harvest and the bottled nectar.

All that stuff gets in the way, yet you want to tell your friends and neighbors that you own a wine label—fine. But puleeze, don’t have the boss try to make it sound like this is just another good old American networking event to “get involved.”

Custom crush for the consumer is a business built on an ego trip. There’s no disgrace to admitting that, but it is unseemly to try to explain it as more than what it is.

Steve Heimoff blog

If you are reading this entry anywhere other than on the vinofictions blog, be aware that it has been lifted without my permission (and without recompense), and that’s a copyright infringement, no matter that the copyright information appears with it.

Copyright Thomas Pellechia
October 2009. All rights reserved.

FTC and Social Media

If you have been in a coma, away from computer access, or generally impervious to the blogging world, you might have missed the big to-do recently concerning new disclosure guidelines by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). This is the federal organization that keeps watch over “truth-in-advertising,” among other things. You can see how well this outfit does its job by watching a few television ads, especially the pharmaceutical ones—does the name Jarvik bring up memories?

Among the many things the FTC tries to curtail are connections between celebrities and the products that they endorse. Being paid to do a TV ad is not exactly the same thing as saying something in the ad that isn’t true.

One of the things that did in the Pfizer ad with Dr. Jarvik (the man who engineered a heart pump) was that the ad showed consumers that since Jarvik takes Lipitor he’s able to row a boat, but the guy rowing the boat was a double. That is not truth in advertising.

The rowboat affair was a worse offense than the possibility that Jarvik, who has an MD but has no medical license, may have been practicing medicine on TV without a license when he recommended Lipitor. The point was that consumers were not informed that he is not a practicing physician and the word “doctor” left the impression that he was.

Along with overseeing what goes on with TV, radio, and print ads and endorsements, the FTC now plans to get serious about the Internet. Regarding online network marketing, the Commission says:

“The Commission disagrees with the assertion that modern network marketing programs are just updated versions of traditional supermarket sampling programs. The primary goal of those programs was to have the shopper who tasted the advertiser’s product continue down the grocery store aisle and purchase the product. The primary goal of the new viral marketing programs is to have these individuals ‘spread the word’ about the product, so that other consumers will buy it.”

Its viral nature is one fear the FTC has about the Internet, and it is a fear that doesn’t seem aimed at wine reviewers. It’s aimed at social networking.

Another thing the new FTC ruling looked at is the concept of endorsement. Here’s what they have to say about that:

“The Commission does not believe that all uses of new consumer-generated media to discuss product attributes or consumer experiences should be deemed ‘endorsements’ within the meaning of the Guides. Rather, in analyzing statements made via these new media, the fundamental question is whether, viewed objectively, the relationship between the advertiser and the speaker is such that the speaker’s statement can be considered ‘sponsored’ by the advertiser and therefore an advertising message…is the speaker: (1) acting solely independently, in which case there is no endorsement, or (2) acting on behalf of the advertiser or its agent, such that the speaker’s statement is an ‘endorsement’ that is part of an overall marketing campaign?

Even if that consumer receives a single, unsolicited item from one manufacturer and writes positively about it on a personal blog or on a public message board, the review is not likely to be deemed an ‘endorsement,’ given the absence of a course of dealing with that advertiser (or others) that would suggest that the consumer is disseminating a sponsored advertising message.”

Those two paragraphs alone should alleviate the concern of wine bloggers, provided they are not endorsing wines for anyone and provided they are not asked by anyone to produce a review. I’m remembering a conversation months ago when Tom Wark expressed on his blog, Fermentation, dismay that wine bloggers agreed to work with a marketing team—that could easily be seen as an endorsement by the FTC, and Tom was correct to point it out. But he was also screamed at by many bloggers.

In the last two FTC paragraphs above the words “consumer-generated,” and “new media” appear. This points to another contentious issue with wine bloggers.

The FTC clearly states that, with regard to product reviews, its new disclosure guidelines apply to new media (social media online). If free samples of product come with strings attached, the FTC holds the print media outfit and the advertiser to the same rules of endorsement as it holds any other media; it just does not require that the print media make disclosure to its readers. The reason it gives for this separate treatment is that the reviewer is an employee of the print media (magazine, newsletter, or newspaper). The reader knows this, and also knows the lines of responsibility. It’s understood that the review is at the end of that line.

The problem that the FTC has with the consumer-generated media is that it is impossible for both the consumer and the FTC to understand and know the lines between the producer/advertiser/marketer and the reviewer. Because of that ambiguity, the FTC requires that some social media product reviews must come with a disclosure, and that it is the advertiser/marketers responsibility to tell that to the reviewer.

In addition, it’s the advertiser’s responsibility to make every effort to ensure that what a blogger says is accurate. Here’s what the FTC says about that:

“The Commission recognizes that because the advertiser does not disseminate the endorsements made using these new consumer-generated media, it does not have complete control over the contents of those statements. Nonetheless, if the advertiser initiated the process that led to these endorsements being made—e.g., by providing products to well-known bloggers or to endorsers enrolled in word of mouth marketing programs—it potentially is liable for misleading statements made...”

After reading the many blogs that are “up in arms” over this issue and then reading the FTC explanation of the new guidelines I’ve come to the conclusion that there’s nothing for reputable wine bloggers to worry about—provided they simply state the facts. To me, the crucial point of the new FTC guidelines is summed up in the following paragraph:

“…a blogger could receive merchandise from a marketer with a request to review it, but with no compensation paid other than the value of the product itself. In this situation, whether or not any positive statement the blogger posts would be deemed an ‘endorsement’ within the meaning of the Guides would depend on, among other things, the value of that product, and on whether the blogger routinely receives such requests. If that blogger frequently receives products from manufacturers because he or she is known to have wide readership within a particular demographic group that is the manufacturers’ target market, the blogger’s statements are likely to be deemed to be endorsements…”

The FTC wants the advertisers to tell the bloggers that they must make a disclosure statement with their reviews.

The FTC also threw down a gauntlet to bloggers that I find interesting.

“…to the extent that consumers’ willingness to trust social media depends on the ability of those media to retain their credibility as reliable sources of information, application of the general principles embodied in the Guides presumably would have a beneficial, not detrimental, effect.”

The way I see it, wine bloggers have two options when they review wine: buy the wine or make a disclosure statement on the blog explaining that the wine was free but there were no strings attached to the review—none—and be sure to be able to prove it in the unlikely even that FTC asks (in an interview, one FTC spokesman said plainly that they haven't the intention to monitor the thousands of blogs on the Internet, which once again implies where their focus is).

It’s probably a good idea to also say how you go about evaluating the wine (blind, not blind, with food, without food, with a group, by yourself, under water, on a mountaintop, whatever). It has nothing to do with disclosure for the FTC or for legal reasons, but it would make sense to the consumer.

If you are reading this entry anywhere other than on the vinofictions blog, be aware that it has been lifted without my permission (and without recompense), and that’s a copyright infringement, no matter that the copyright information appears with it.

Copyright Thomas Pellechia
October 2009. All rights reserved.