June 23 2007
There has been a lot of chatter in the wine blogosphere about wine ratings, kicked off by W. Blake Gray’s San Francisco Chronicle article from a week ago Thursday; I’m a couple of days late to the party.
Stephen Bachmann from Vinfolio, Tom from Fermentation, El Jefe from Twisted Oak, Tim from Winecast, Josh from Pinot Blogger and a good number of others via post or comments have weighed in.
Most of the discourse is along the following lines:
1) Wine ratings are too subjective
2) Wine ratings are valuable tools
3) Let’s not use a 100 point system, let’s use this system
I’ll be the first to admit that it’s really hard for me to care too much. I don’t rate wine myself, except under exceedingly rare circumstance, and I don’t tend to buy a lot of wine that gets rated, mostly due to availability. Neither have I seen the destructiveness that wine ratings can wield--both pro and con--to vintners.
For the most part, I only get worked up about things that I can change. Frankly, I would rather teach summer school math to high school delinquents then try and change the 100 point system. At least with the math teaching I know I could influence one kid; that’s how strongly I believe we’re entrenched in the system. I also tend to write stories around wine, generally speaking, so that may be an indicator of where my general politics around wine ratings lay.
El Jefe from Twisted Oak had a reasoned, passionate and poetic response on his blog when he said, in response to a suggestion for a five star system:
Tell me what you ate with the wine.
Tell me how the wine made you feel.
Tell me how it smelled.
Tell me what memories the wine evoked.
Tell me what senses were engaged.
Tell me what flavors excited you.
Tell me how it connected you with the people who made the wine, the people that grew it, the people who thought to share it with you.
Tell me about your friends, tell me about your family, tell me about the lover you shared the wine with.
Tell me about their passions. Tell me about your passions.
Next time you make love, tell me how it rated on a five star scale.
I don’t have much of an answer for this philosophical debate, but I do have some food for thought.
I urge everybody to go this blog, based of this Washington Post article (it’s a feature piece, so it’s long, but worth reading in its entirety) and read about a social experiment that, in the summarized words of the blogger:
Here is what this “experiment” - which had been set up by the Washington Post’s Gene Weingarten - was all about: On January 12, 2007, the 39 year old, amazingly handsome virtuoso violinist Joshua Bell who, according to Julie, “gets something like $1,000 per minute for solo performances in the world’s fanciest halls” performed, for a period of 43 minutes, six classical pieces on his $3.5 million Stradivarius. The one particularity of this performance is that it took place during the morning rush hour (from 7:51 to 8:34) in the L’Enfant Plaza metro station in Washington, D.C.
This experiment was, according to the Washington Post one “in context, perception, and priorities - as well an unblinking assessment of public taste: In a banal setting at an inconvenient time, would beauty transcend?”
The Washington Post article notes:
No crowd ever gathered for Bell at L’Enfant Plaza, not even for a second. In fact, for the nearly three-quarters of an hour that he played, only seven people stopped what they were doing to hang around, at least briefly, and take in the performance. Twenty-seven gave money, most of them on the run—for a total of $32 and change. That meant there were 1,070 people who simply hurried by, oblivious, many only three feet away, few even turning to look.
It may be that our virtuoso ignored offers two parallel points for the world of wine, related to scores.
1) In a banal setting at an inconvenient time, would beauty transcend?
2) If a great musician plays great music but no one hears . . . was he really any good?
Or, to say it directly, without a rating, if there is a beautiful, carefully crafted bottle of wine sitting in a wine shop, does it transcend its place and circumstance in order to become bottled poetry to whoever acquires it?
There’s another compelling piece to the article:
The poet Billy Collins once laughingly observed that all babies are born with a knowledge of poetry, because the lub-dub of the mother’s heart is in iambic meter. Then, Collins said, life slowly starts to choke the poetry out of us. It may be true with music, too.
It may be true with wine, as well. Perhaps ratings help us fill our cup with poetry lost so that we may gamely use wine to subsequently fill in our need, as humans, to fill our lives full of story and meaning with a rich patina?
In this regard, ratings help us find the art that we need to fill our lives up with, to stay human, refined, a reasoned animal that feels.
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