A very interesting subject!
Over the years I have done some freelance journalism, and seen how hard it is to stay "objective", insofar as this is actually possible.
When you fraternize with wine producers - as one inevitably does - rating their wines or talking about them necessarily
becomes ambiguous (this is not forgetting, of course, that there's "slightly ambiguous" and "very ambiguous"!).
I did a series of château profiles at one time.
What do you do when someone spends half a day with you and invites you to a great lunch with rare old wines?
Say their wine is crap?
Obviously, there are ways around this if you need to be critical.
There's what I call "damning with faint praise" - describing a wine in such a way that an intelligent person will read between the lines and catch your drift.
But, I believe that it is *impossible* to dissociate oneself *entirely* from personal relationships one may have had in the world of wine.
I'll give you an example of a case of inadvertent bias. There's a very good wine blog called The Wine Doctor, written by an English doctor names Chris Kinnock
whom I was pleased to meet once in Bordeaux. I recently went to his site to check out his opinions on a Bordeaux château or two. I also came across an interesting
overview of market trends, and was delighted to see proper attention given to the "lesser wines" of Bordeaux.
http://www.thewinedoctor.com/regionalgu ... ture.shtmlThe only problem is that, among the small selection of wines he cited, 3 are owned by fellow Brits and one by an American.
This is hardly representative of Bordeaux, and gives a skewed picture of things.
Its by no stretch of the imagination dishonest! What it does show is that people write about what they know. And who they know.
Do corrupt wine writers exist? Sure they do. One very well-known English wine writer regularly receives gifts of expensive wine.
I have an intuition though that this is the exception rather than the rule.
You may well ask: does receiving that wine imply that the critic has necessarily been "bought"?
I am tempted to answer: yes.
Most wine writers I know edit their notes according to a wine's reputation. Taking what I know best (Bordeaux), scores are "readjusted" according to the wine's reptuation and price tag. In other words, there's a pecking order here, and critics tend not to stray too far from it.
The crux of the issue is this: should critics be unfailingly honest, even if it means giving a poor impression of someone they know and like?
Is an itsy bitsy bit of indulgence really that awful?
In an ideal world, the answer would be yes, yes, and yes.
However, as the issue is not all black and white, I think that even people who *try* to be honest and open, have great difficulty doing so!
Speaking of honesty, I'm a great fan of blind tasting.
Many critics do not evaluate wines this way.
That is, unfotunately, a way of loading the dice in my opinion.
Once again, I'm not rejecting this or any other method wholesale, just pointing out how I see things
.
Best regards,
Alex R.
