Last week brought the curious announcement that the Michelin Guide plans to start reviewing wine. It’s not clear how this will work given that the Michelin Guide already owns The Wine Advocate, the longstanding newsletter started by Robert Parker. Alder Yarrow at Vinography has some speculations about what might be going on as well some very good questions about it’s value to wine consumers. This point was especially interesting:
Over the last 20 years, the wine industry has proven quite definitively that we can’t grow the audience of wine lovers much larger—we can only carve it into smaller and smaller pieces. From that perspective, tacking on a wine offering to a much bigger food-and-travel-focused audience doesn’t sound like a poor strategy.
That makes sense. But strategy is one thing; ideology is another. I wonder what kind of taste-politics will Michelin bring to the glass?
Michelin’s restaurant worldview is two-tiered. On the one hand, Bib Gourmand and most one-stars reward refinement and consistency—craft, service, and convention without the fireworks and pleasure without vertigo. On the other hand, the three-star pantheon (and aspiring 2-stars) canonize singularity: chefs who subvert conventions and recompose form to come up with something unprecedented, so long as the results remain delicious. The cooking is still refined and the service impeccable but innovation and creativity are the criteria. I’m happy with that. If I’m going to part with $300–$400 a head plus wine, I want a vision I can’t get elsewhere.
Wine, however, organizes value differently. The greatest wines are distinctive, but their distinctiveness is not primarily from innovation in the chef’s sense; it is the expression of a place—genius loci, a particular configuration of soils, exposures, yeasts, and the historically sedimented taste of a people in a place. The best Mosel Riesling is not “new”; it’s more Mosel than the Mosel—sleeker slate, tighter lime, a cooler breath in the mid-palate. Parker’s points, for all their utility, were never great at scoring this kind of distinctiveness. The scale incentivized ripeness, polish, and new oak for red wine, an international style that often shaved off rough edges, the idiosyncrasies that make regions themselves. The herbal bite of Chianti’s sangiovese, the ferrous swagger of Cornas, the salt-lick of Muscadet were not in themselves valued. Homogenized excellence is still excellence, but it is poor at world-making.
So which Michelin will show up for wine? The managerial Michelin that codifies competence and narrows variance? Or the three-star Michelin that honors the singular? Several paths suggest themselves.
One path is “Advocate-lite”: numerical scores, a broad global scope, and the usual parade of tasting descriptors. This would dovetail with the existing approach and reassure collectors. It would also continue to sand terroir into style.
Another path is the “place-first” approach”: regionally rooted tastings, typicity as a positive value, and attention to cultural context with producers situated alongside farming choices, fermentation practices, and culinary pairings in the region that birthed them. Here Michelin could leverage what it actually understands: hospitality. Imagine assessments that ask not only “Is this wine great?” but “What world does it let you inhabit, and with what food does that world make the most sense?”
A bolder path would treat singularity in wine as Michelin treats singularity on the plate. That would mean rewarding expression over horsepower, fruit that speaks its own dialect rather than lingua franca.
If Michelin chooses the first path, we get more of the same: a glossier scoreboard. If it chooses the second or third, we might get something rarer—a guide that uses its cultural heft to re-center distinctiveness as place, not polish. My hope (and challenge to them) is to: review wine as you review your bravest restaurants. Reward the singular, protect the weird, and teach the public to crave difference that tastes like somewhere.
Exploring the Philosophy of Food and Wine 