Criticising Wine - What is reasonable?
Posted: Thu Jul 20, 2006 7:00 pm
I would like to pose to you the question as to what is reasonable when reviewing wine.
I recently attended a trade show and tried what I believed to be one of the faultiest wines I have ever experienced, mercaptan/dms/barnyard dominant. I mentioned this to the winemaker who was pouring the wine, but he found it to be sound and wasn't interested in trying another bottle (this may become clear as to why in a moment).
The event was held over two days and some friends who are in the industry tried the wine without being told about it from me, from a fresh bottle the next day and found it just as unfit to be consumed with one stating “Summer Nat burnout ring, mercaptan, DMS, DMDS it had the works”.
Taking all this into account, I wrote up my quick notes in February and put them on my wine website and I stated that I had hoped that this wine was an off-bottle as the propritors seemed nice, but that I could only review what was in the glass on the day. I gave the wine 50 points as it was, in my opinion the most faulty wine I've tasted and I couldn't find any redeeming qualities or imagine it being any worse.
Fast forward to a few weeks ago and I receive a threat of legal action from the winery in my email, saying that if I do not remove the reviews further legal action will be taken. Not exactly the way to get me onside to your cause as a first contact! This is the action that I think someone would take if they knew the wine was bad, they didn't want to talk about it or offer to send me a new sample to turn my opinion - they wanted my opinion removed and they didn't mind thinking that they might be able to bully me into it.
Needless to say I didn't remove the review and I responded to say that writing a review or having an opinion be it good or bad isn't illegal. There is a bit more to the story, but I'll finish here for the point of my post.
Should wine reviewers (that includes people who post on message boards, personal sites etc) hold back reviews of bad wines? For me a problem with the old style media (newspapers, magazines etc) is that due to a lack of space they cannot publish bad reviews and will concentrate on positive opinions. This is something that wineries have probably gotten used to and they are not going to like the new style media with unlimited space and quite a bit of reach through regular readers as well as people looking for information on the wine via search engines.
I know that making wine is not easy, and that it requires passion and dedication especially from small producers in these tough times - so I do not especially want to cause hurt to any one, but on the other hand I do want to make sure that the readers of my site, people who read my posts on message boards and those consumers that are looking for information on wines have as much information available to them as possible.
I would appreciate any feedback. If you want to read the brief notes (keep in mind they are brief impressions from a trade show, so they are brief!) they are here -> http://www.camwheeler.com/wine/?p=144 and my full response to the situation is here -> http://www.camwheeler.com/wine/?p=207
I recently attended a trade show and tried what I believed to be one of the faultiest wines I have ever experienced, mercaptan/dms/barnyard dominant. I mentioned this to the winemaker who was pouring the wine, but he found it to be sound and wasn't interested in trying another bottle (this may become clear as to why in a moment).
The event was held over two days and some friends who are in the industry tried the wine without being told about it from me, from a fresh bottle the next day and found it just as unfit to be consumed with one stating “Summer Nat burnout ring, mercaptan, DMS, DMDS it had the works”.
Taking all this into account, I wrote up my quick notes in February and put them on my wine website and I stated that I had hoped that this wine was an off-bottle as the propritors seemed nice, but that I could only review what was in the glass on the day. I gave the wine 50 points as it was, in my opinion the most faulty wine I've tasted and I couldn't find any redeeming qualities or imagine it being any worse.
Fast forward to a few weeks ago and I receive a threat of legal action from the winery in my email, saying that if I do not remove the reviews further legal action will be taken. Not exactly the way to get me onside to your cause as a first contact! This is the action that I think someone would take if they knew the wine was bad, they didn't want to talk about it or offer to send me a new sample to turn my opinion - they wanted my opinion removed and they didn't mind thinking that they might be able to bully me into it.
Needless to say I didn't remove the review and I responded to say that writing a review or having an opinion be it good or bad isn't illegal. There is a bit more to the story, but I'll finish here for the point of my post.
Should wine reviewers (that includes people who post on message boards, personal sites etc) hold back reviews of bad wines? For me a problem with the old style media (newspapers, magazines etc) is that due to a lack of space they cannot publish bad reviews and will concentrate on positive opinions. This is something that wineries have probably gotten used to and they are not going to like the new style media with unlimited space and quite a bit of reach through regular readers as well as people looking for information on the wine via search engines.
I know that making wine is not easy, and that it requires passion and dedication especially from small producers in these tough times - so I do not especially want to cause hurt to any one, but on the other hand I do want to make sure that the readers of my site, people who read my posts on message boards and those consumers that are looking for information on wines have as much information available to them as possible.
I would appreciate any feedback. If you want to read the brief notes (keep in mind they are brief impressions from a trade show, so they are brief!) they are here -> http://www.camwheeler.com/wine/?p=144 and my full response to the situation is here -> http://www.camwheeler.com/wine/?p=207