{"id":9606,"date":"2014-04-17T06:43:08","date_gmt":"2014-04-17T06:43:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wineanorak.com:\/wineblog\/?p=9606"},"modified":"2014-04-17T06:43:08","modified_gmt":"2014-04-17T06:43:08","slug":"feedback-on-my-post-on-critics-and-style-preferences","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.wineanorak.com:\/wineblog\/uncategorized\/feedback-on-my-post-on-critics-and-style-preferences","title":{"rendered":"Feedback on my post on critics and style preferences"},"content":{"rendered":"

My recent post on whether or not wine critics can judge wines without their personal style preferences coming into play<\/a> got quite a bit of reaction, both in the comments section, and also on Twitter. I thought it would be worthwhile looking at some of the responses.<\/p>\n

Most of the comments agreed with my point of view. This doesn’t, of course, mean that what I said was correct: majorities have been wrong before. It does expose, though, a divide between the wine critic model popular in the USA (where the critic sets aside her or his personal taste to try to deliver an objective assessment of the wine that will be useful for all readers), and the reality most of us who taste lots of wine experience (which is that it is virtually impossible to set aside our preferences when we come to interesting wine, and it is probably not all that desirable).<\/p>\n

Here are some of the comments:<\/p>\n

‘Critics should involve their style preference so they can develop a following of like-minded readers’<\/p>\n

‘Just name your style preference when judging, public will judge your judgement accordingly’<\/p>\n

‘Opinion is by definition subjective. Just be clear as to what you value to readers’<\/p>\n

‘Those who can recognize and assess wine quality in spite of style and personal preference are pros’<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The three following comments make a good point. A critic can set out to be objective in their work, and be self-disciplined and scrupulous, yet still display bias in their work based on their own biology as well as their personal preferences:<\/p>\n

‘Kahnemann won a nobel prize for showing how much biases influence our thinking. Silly to argue tasting is immune.’<\/p>\n

‘The brain needs a huge amount of interpretation to recall and identify flavours’<\/p>\n

‘Can one transcend one’s own subjectivity? Worth a try but not sure about the outcome though…’\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

American wine writer Mike Steinberger made a good point:<\/p>\n

Interesting topic, but it seems to me you have missed a key point. Critics and especially those who depend entirely on subscriptions have an economic incentive to be equal-opportunity point floggers, to embrace all styles. If the trash a particular style they risk offending people who enjoy that style. It might cost them current or future subscribers.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This is an interesting perspective. Does this economic incentive box the leading US critics into a corner where they have to judge wine with one eye on their subscriber base? As an independent, I try to respect all the wines I taste, and be as useful a critic to my readers as I can. But there are some styles of wine I really dislike, and I’m not going to do the silly thing of giving them high point scores because there might be some readers out there that like this style. It all gets a bit silly if you try to recognize well made versions of wines you don’t like versus badly made versions. Some people like super-ripe spoofy wines. As a critic, how do you distinguish good super-ripe spoofy wines from bad? <\/p>\n

Where the discussion got more complicated was in relation to my slightly naughty comment that not all styles of wine are legitimate. Here, many thought I’d over-stepped the boundary. Surely, it should be for the market to decide what is legitimate? Some pointed out my apparent hypocrisy: a while back I made a video in which I tasted Gallo’s Apothic red wine with its elevated residual sugar levels. I commented that this was well made in its style: surely, if any style is illegitimate, it is sweetened up commercial red wines?<\/p>\n

‘Certain styles of wine are not legitimate’ completely agree, good taste is not a democracy<\/p>\n

‘The bigger issue is, can you say certain wine styles are not legitimate?’<\/p>\n

‘Consumers choice to make legitimate or not’<\/p>\n

‘Some \u201cwines\u201d should simply not be. Period.’<\/p>\n

‘There are perhaps degrees of illegitimacy, depending on how utterly faked up\/spoofulated a wine might be’<\/p>\n

‘Our job is to comment on styles and put into context, not create them. Market does what it wants with info after that.’<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Let me explain why I said Apothic is good in its style, yet suggested that some styles are illegitimate. It’s about market segmentation. Different rules apply to inexpensive commercial wines and fine wine. What is acceptable (or excusable) for commercial wine might not be for fine wine. Tricked up commercial wine isn’t something I love, but I accept it and understand there’s a marketplace for it, and while I would rather commercial wines are more honest, I’m not going to go to war against them. But for wines playing in the fine wine sphere, fetching high prices, trickery and spoofulation are not acceptable. It’s a dual standard, but I think it’s justified. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

My recent post on whether or not wine critics can judge wines without their personal style preferences coming into play got quite a bit of reaction, both in the comments…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9606","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wineanorak.com:\/wineblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9606","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wineanorak.com:\/wineblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wineanorak.com:\/wineblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wineanorak.com:\/wineblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wineanorak.com:\/wineblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9606"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.wineanorak.com:\/wineblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9606\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9607,"href":"https:\/\/www.wineanorak.com:\/wineblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9606\/revisions\/9607"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wineanorak.com:\/wineblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9606"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wineanorak.com:\/wineblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9606"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wineanorak.com:\/wineblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9606"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}