Are Wine Reviews Really about Purchasing Decisions?

Wine criticism is usually treated as a buying guide. That makes sense up to a point. Wineries use good reviews to sell bottles. Retailers use shelf talkers to steer you toward a purchase. Scores promise to simplify judgment for people who do not want to decode our strange dialect of cassis, graphite, and crushed violets. And of course price matters. Reviews often mention value.

No doubt  wine criticism sometimes helps people decide what to buy. But that cannot be the deepest purpose of wine criticism.

If the main job of criticism were consumer protection, wine writing would contain far more negative reviews than it does. Directing readers away from bad purchases should matter just as much as steering them toward good ones. Yet truly scathing wine reviews are rare. Wines get marked down for falling short of a vintage’s promise or missing a producer’s usual standard. But outright aesthetic failure? Almost never. That already tells us something. Wine writing is not organized primarily around warning you off bad products.

There is another clue  about the purpose of wine criticism. Much wine criticism spends a good deal of time on matters that go well beyond purchase advice. Critics place wines in a comparison class. They explain vineyard conditions, winemaking choices, regional history, stylistic lineage, and vintage character. They tell you what kind of wine this is, why it matters, and what you should notice when you taste it. That information may affect a buying decision.  But it also enriches the experience after the bottle is open. It deepens memory. It gives the experience of tasting the wine more depth. It makes the wine more meaningful.

And then there is the obvious counterexample to criticism as a buying guide. A great many reviews concern wines that most people will never buy because they are too expensive, impossible to find, or fully allocated before release. Yet those wines still receive lavish notes, and those notes still circulate. If the bottles are already spoken for, the review cannot be mainly about helping ordinary consumers choose what to purchase.

So what is wine writing doing?

At its best, it is pointing to what there is to appreciate in a wine.

That means appreciation comes before evaluation. Or rather, evaluation matters because it serves appreciation.

When a critic praises a Barolo for its tar, dried roses, and stern structure, the point is not simply to issue a verdict from on high. The point is to direct your attention. You may not find exactly the same aromas. No one ever does, at least not with mechanical precision. But a good description helps you notice what is salient, what organizes the wine.The critic is not just reporting but teaching you how to taste.

That matters because wine is a difficult object. It is unstable, hard to pin down, and full of features that disappear if you don’t attend to them. Language helps stabilize the experience just enough for perception to sharpen. If you are drinking the wine, the critic can help you notice what you might otherwise miss. If you drank it last week, the review can help you remember what was significant about it. And even if you will never taste it, you still learn something about what kinds of experience wine can offer.

That is why wine criticism includes so much material that is not strictly necessary for ranking quality. Critics discuss viticulture, cellar practices, producer intent, regional variation, and emerging styles. They report on wines that signal a new direction. They identify differences that deserve attention. In other words, critics do not merely judge. They disclose significance.

This is where the distinction between appreciation and evaluation becomes useful. Appreciation asks: what is here to be savored, understood, noticed, or thought about? Evaluation asks: how good is it? The second question is narrower. It requires standards, criteria, and usually some sense of what counts as excellence in advance. Appreciation is broader. It includes quality, but it also includes meaning, character, mood, distinctiveness, and the kinds of experience an wine makes available.

That broader task matters even for people who will never own the bottle. Wine is not just a market. It is an aesthetic community. It is held together by shared standards, arguments about excellence, and above all by a collective search for difference, for wines that say something new, or say something old with unusual force. Critics help sustain that community by discovering and naming what deserves recognition. They make differences legible. They give shape and significance to what might otherwise pass unnoticed.

And that is also why the wine world needs critics with different palates, not just different numerical scales. Aesthetic communities thrive on perceptual range. The more ways there are of noticing what matters, the richer the culture becomes.

People will always use reviews to decide what to buy. That is a perfectly good function of criticism. But it is secondary. The larger aim of wine writing is not to help you shop. It is to help you appreciate.