Are Wines’ Ideological Battles Over?

At Wine Searcher, Oliver Styles is lamenting the lack of controversy in the wine world today, especially when it comes to reviewing established, highly regarded wines.

Because there are no more accidents, no more outrageous personality statements, no more pannings of top names. By and large, blind wine tasting has been completely dropped from the repertoire of the wine critic. Very few publications do so – and I’m not counting the ones that taste wines blind and then reassess their score once the wine has been revealed.

If nothing else, the latter approach epitomizes the state of wine rating today: a sprinkle of personal opinion, but always tempered by the acknowledgement of greatness. There are no accidental 88-pointers, just as the game between 95 and 100 points is now an indication of the wine taster’s personality. Jimmy gave Latour 96 points but Jemima was having none of their new oak regime with that outrageous 95-point score in her latest review.

In other words, all wine rating is now perfection: 100 points all-round. Read a good, detailed book on a wine region? Job done. Score accordingly.

If a wine has a great reputation, no one wants to stick their neck out and call them out for a bad vintage or a misbegotten blend. The estates will complain, your peers will question your palate, career over.

And the problem is not limited to wine scoring. There is, he argues, a disturbing lack of controversy in the wine world today.

We’re also getting less and less used to disagreeing with people over matters of taste while at the same time getting wine producers used to the idea that their production will rarely get a bum score. I think that’s a shame.

I entirely agree. I looked back over some of my posts from 10 years ago.

Robert Parker was complaining about the “anti-flavor elite” promoting obscure varietals with too little extraction. In Pursuit of Balance was giving their controversial seminars on what Pinot Noir and Chardonnay should taste like. They were then skewered by the Hosemaster of Wine

who referred to In Pursuit of Balance as “likeminded people who understood that Balance in wine is truthfully defined as the interplay of fruit, marketing, self-promotion and faux philosophy.”

The Hosemaster could cut like a knife.

Tom Wark was railing against natural wine marketing while natural wine guru Alice Feiring was condemning the use of any amount of sulfur as a sellout to corporate tastes.

Today, the ideological battles seem to have disappeared, perhaps because the industry is cowed by the decline in demand for their products.

But this is not a happy state of affairs.

We develop ideological frameworks because they help us pay attention to what we, out of habit, might fail to notice. Rajat Parr’s constant advice to seek balance or Robert Parker’s diatribes in support of big flavors were attempts to get us to break old habits and look at wine from a different point of view (or in Parker’s case to return to our forgotten roots). Whether one agrees or not is beside the point. The controversy makes us think.

We know from all the empirical evidence that beliefs and context influence what we taste. Theories about what wine should taste like are attempts to reframe our drinking habits; they make wine more interesting not less. If they become wearisome it is not because ideas are irrelevant but because they wear out their welcome after awhile and we need new ideas—we need more ideology not less.