THERE WAS a time wine didn’t need to be rated. It was enough to enjoy some alongside food. Wine was made to be drunk and not flaunted. It was a way of life and not a step-up on the social ladder that it is today. Some may argue that those wines weren’t really special nor delicious and conversely rating them would have been futile. More pertinently, wine was bought and drunk almost immediately, so the idea of storing wine for extended periods was not common.
But this was centuries ago. As winemaking improved, man learnt to make wine that could age for years, even decades. People would buy a small yet sizeable stock, then age it and dip into their stash every now and then to try a precious bottle with friends and assess its worth. If it still seemed young, they would let it age encore. If it appeared to have come of age, they would make haste to finish the remaining stock.
As no two vintages are ever alike—with respect to the weather—the wine made in any two years will not age the same way. So while one vintage might live on for a good 50 years, wines from the same producer but another year will wither maybe after barely 20 years. This anomaly is too vast and too difficult for consumers to remember on the tips of their fingers, especially when they go buying expensive wines. This is where vintage charts somewhat helped, giving an idea of how good a certain year was making wine and how would the wines from that vintage for a given region age. Of course, this was still too general, for a winery could make great wine in a bad year and some others made horrible wine even in the best of years.
And this is where rating wines made a lot of sense to help the consumer make the right decision. By rating a wine, one factored in the winemaker’s capabilities, as also the quality of the vintage, and this helped create a more absolute picture of the quality of any given wine from anywhere, and in any given year.
Sounds too detailed, but when you have a few hundred pounds (or dollars, or euros) riding on a bottle (and you may be in the market for six of them!), then having these ratings can really help.
Many a famed critic has acquired quite the reputation for rating wines. Most choose to specialise in certain regions and release reports or publish their results in some format or another. Some critics can be so influential that their comments can influence the sales and subsequently the selling price of a wine.
So if a house gets a bad rating from a critic, then not only will they find fewer takers for their current vintage that’s on the market, the problem may even seep into the next year, affecting release prices even before the wine has been made. When a company has mortgages to pay, such fluctuations can be detrimental to their sustainability.
A 100-point rating, conversely, could rocket a house into stratospheric levels of success, with demand far exceeding supply, and even one such year could see them laughing their way to the bank consistently for the next decade.
Given how fragile the system is and how it relies not on the people who make the wine, but rather those who assess it, there is much criticism over these rating systems and many people, mostly winemakers, blame the critics for having too much influence—we all know what absolute power can do to the humblest of souls. Often, critics will prefer a certain style of wine, thereby projecting it on the consumer and, over time, houses have to align themselves with the palates of such critics in order to secure a high rating.
While I am not against the idea of rating and judging wines (I am writing this from London where I am a senior judge at the International Wine Challenge), I do believe that many a wine only shows its true merit when served alongside food at a table surrounded by friends and loved ones. If the difference between a 99-point wine and a 100-point wine is largely in the ‘emotion of the moment’, as said one big critic, then having the right company when you sample a wine for the first time could be the most important factor in making or breaking the reputation of a brand in your social circle.
In other words, if you have good wine, and good friends, combine them, as often as you can.
The writer is a sommelier