Wine Enthusiast Magazine
SubscribeIs it better for wine critics and wine competitions to buy their wines at retail, rather than accept free samples from wineries and importers, as is usually the case? The risk of getting what Robert Parker has called a journalist’s cuvee or writer’s cuvee from a winery instead of the real wine that people are buying in stores is, theoretically, always there.
A winery, an importer, a rogue PR person bent on getting only 90-plus scores for his client takes a day off from blogging, goes to the store and buys a few bottles of $60 Russian River Chardonnay or $200 Montrachet. It’s easy with a home winemaker’s tools to empty a few bottles of the client’s wine, refill them with the expensive stuff, recork them, even with the original corks if he took them out with an ah-so. A bit trickier is replacing the foil and spinning it on, but with a supply of the right foil caps and a foil spinner that you can rent from a home winemaking store, it’s not difficult.
In fact, most wineries already do a version of this (without the subterfuge) when they prepare pre-release samples for in-house tastings, for critics’ barrel tastings, for trade and consumer tastings, and special events at the wineries. They don’t make a blend from every barrel or tank that will be included in the final product. They approximate it. They usually don’t copy the final retail packaging, using a simple lab sample label instead. But a media-savvy winery that wants to set out an attractive bottle will sometimes use labels that look like the commercial packaging.
Judgings and journals don’t have anti-fraud units. When a bottle comes in they don’t inspect it for fingerprints and DNA, or test it vs. store-bought bottles to find discrepancies (although this is sometimes done by the journals when blind-tasting results don’t make sense). If it’s a judging, they happily take the bottle out of the box and deposit the check that comes along with it. In 2006 the California State Fair received 2,926 entries at $45 each, which supplied $131,670 for staff, crackers and glasses.
The journals that I know about do not charge tasting fees, which is smart. But they do accept the free samples. If they didn’t, an aggressive tasting organization like Wine Enthusiast could easily spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to buy thousands of bottles annually, and they’d need full-time shoppers to buy and schlep the bottles back to the office.
Wine Enthusiast and others buy a portion of their review wines, especially from recalcitrant wineries that refuse to send samples, and in cases where they want to double check whether they might have been sent a journalist’s cuvee. When I was at a previous publication, there was a period when a sizeable group of Burgundy producers were so ticked off at the magazine’s Burgundy critic’s reviews of their wines that they boycotted that magazine for years, and the magazine had to buy the wines through different channels to have any access to them at all. Some small, cult California wineries refuse to send samples, too. As I recall Heitz Cellar in Napa Valley was an early adopter of this no-send policy.
A few journalists buy most or all of their samples this way, and more power to them. That’s the protocol for Dorothy Gaiter and John Brecher of the Wall Street Journal, and for Charlie Olken’s Connoisseur’s Guide to California Wine. It gives them bragging rights for going to extremes to remain objective and untainted, but it’s not a foolproof plan, either.
Bottles found in retail stores are more likely to be stale or to have been spoiled in transit, in a distributor’s warehouse, in a window display, etc., than sample bottles sent directly from a winery’s cellar. And buying only at retail means you’re much less likely to discover new or little-known wineries, because only a limited number of wines can be stocked in any store.
If journalist’s cuvees exist, I can’t recall any publication ever proving it–documenting a case through lab tests, etc. Please correct me if I’m wrong.
And here’s the thing: If you were a scheming winemaker or marketer in charge of sending samples, what wine you substitute for your wine? Competitions with panels of several people tend to toss out the most distinctive wines in a group, because at least one of the judges will be prejudiced against too much oak flavor, too much alcohol, too much acidity or something else. What the marketplaces judges as the best wines, those with the highest prices, usually have extremes in their flavor profiles, so they rarely get the gold and double-gold medals.
It’s different with individual critics who taste alone, or small two-to-three person panels that taste together regularly. They can and do single out unusual and extreme wines for praise.
Neither the $200 Montrachet nor the $60 Russian River would probably gain unanimous praise from multiple judges for the same reasons that they cost so much — they’re often distinctive, different, memorable, maybe quirky in flavor profile. So, what wine would an unscrupulous winery choose to decant into its own bottle?
Filed under: Critics/Competitions
6 Comments
July 18th, 2007 at 4:34:21 PM
Interesting post–and welcome to the blogosphere. I don’t get many samples, but I accept the ones that I do get to help me bring a wider range of tasting notes to readers. 99% of the wine I review I buy myself, like most bloggers. It will be fascinating to see if the Wine and Technology conference fallout regarding the importance of wine blogging and other consumer generated media means that more samples will find their way to bloggers.
July 19th, 2007 at 1:35:32 PM
During my two and a half years working for several wine magazines, I never heard about “journalists’ cuvees.” But what an interesting idea. You could take it one step further and wonder whether larger retailers, when tasting samples they’re considering buying large lots of, are given similar doctored wines. In reality though, I doubt that many winemakers would go through the trouble to subsitite another wine for their own. Most are far too proud of what they make, regardless of the points earned.
July 19th, 2007 at 5:06:01 PM
Interesting post and in the same vane as the Two Buck Chuck fiasco. Since he’s a one man show for many of his reviews it’s easy to imagine that Robert Parker must’ve received a “critic cuvee” at one time or another. If all it takes to get a Parker 90 is to buy a bottle of an over-the-top wine that he loves, pour it into your bottle and send it in to him, someone must’ve at least tried it.
I think the bigger issue is the 30 seconds to 2 minutes that a critic, judge or panel spends with a wine before determining its fate. I know there are thousands of wines out there, but can’t anyone spend some more time with a wine, linger over it, have some food, see how it changes over an hour or two as you sip it, before stamping it with an 82 or a 96 or a double gold or whatever? I don’t see how you can get to the essence of a wine in under 2 minutes.
July 19th, 2007 at 8:18:16 PM
“If journalist’s cuvees exist, I can’t recall any publication ever proving it–documenting a case through lab tests, etc. Please correct me if I’m wrong.”
Something like this happened with the 2006 Wither Hills Sauvignon Blanc from New Zealand. Samples submited for competition were apparently from an early batch of wine (2,228 cases out of a total production of 100,000). Store bought and competition samples were found to differ in their content of alcohol, sugar and acidity. The winemaker,Brent Marris, resigned as chief judge of the Air New Zealand wine awards and Wither Hills returned all medals awarded to the wine.
Want to read more? http://shirazshiraz.blogspot.com/2006/12/its-all-same-wine-yeah-right.html
Mike
July 19th, 2007 at 11:41:11 PM
I am always amused when the Wine Spectators of the world state they don’t think a winery would take the risk of submitting a different wine for review than what’s sold in stores. That it would irreparably harm their reputation. Yet, it is Spectator that is, in fact, risking THEIR franchise by not bulletproofing the process.
What’s wrong with the current system? Nothing, if everyone plays by the rules. But increasingly, wineries won’t. They can’t have their financial year hinge on a critic’s 15-second sip and spit. The stakes are simply too high to leave to chance. Ratings are a game and wineries will play to win. They have millions of dollars at stake, and million-dollar egos. So they are tempted to beat the system, the WS system. Here’s how they can do it:
WS’s office requests finished and labeled samples from wineries, which they provide. However the wine in the bottles is not necessarily the 2004 Winery X cabernet as labeled. It might contain their high scoring ’02 vintage. Or it might actually be another winery’s high scoring cab. Or it might truly be their 2004 cabernet, but it is not the final blend; rather it’s from the best barrel. Would wineries really do that? They do. Is it avoidable? Absolutely. But it would require Spectator to revamp procedures. To start, the magazine would have to come out of pocket and pay for samples off the shelf.
In baseball, the public used to believe that no gifted player would ever put his body at risk with steroids to get an added advantage. A decade of scandals later, it is the institution of baseball that has the biggest black eye. Sound familiar? The wine review industry is at the same juncture. If fraud is discovered once, yes, scorn will shower down on that winery. But if it happens repeatedly, the anger will be redirected back on the industry. The public will say that Spectator and others, when they had the chance to tighten it up, chose not to do more to protect the integrity of the process.
July 23rd, 2007 at 10:22:13 AM
The Commish’s comment is well thought out. Whether you think of it as a quality/integrity question or purely a business question, I think it still comes back to being a financial matter. Any publication that trusts every wine producer to send in the most typical sample is theoretically taking a financial risk. I know that WS and others do frequent spot checks, however, both on and off the job. It’s also important to grasp that the individual tasters are putting their reputations on the line, too, so they often take extra measures to make sure they’re not duped.