1. Home
2. People & Opinion

Guy Woodward: Seduced by the 1%

The accompanying ‘reviews’ of the latest vintage of Domaine de la Romanée-Conti, Sassicaia, Ornellaia et al are increasingly farcical. Less impartial appraisal and more gushing genuflection, few critics dare to be truly critical of such wines, lest they’re not invited back the following year. So we’re told, for example, that while 2023 yielded the ripest grapes DRC has ever had, with all the wines over 14%, all had ‘stunning balance, detail and concentration without being too intense or exhibiting any signs of over-ripeness’. Well colour me shocked.

Even within these detailed overviews, few focus on the single most important element of the wines. We get the PH, TA, abv, blend, bottle weight, oak treatment, etc, etc, but the price tag? A mere afterthought – as if it’s vulgar even to mention it. So sure, DRC may taste divine. It may even rate 99 points. But are the wines worth £1,000+? I can tell you one thing – no journalist would ever pay their own money for such a wine. Though that didn’t deter The Wine Advocate’s Monica Larner from trailing a countdown to the 6pm release of her ‘review’ of Sassicaia 2023. Sorry to break it to you, Monica, but we were hardly on tenterhooks for the – you’ve guessed it – 100-point verdict.

Then there’s the Grange La Chapelle Wine of the World, humbly described by one of its creators as “like Dali and Picasso painting on the same canvas”. In reality, it’s simply a 50:50 blend of two very good wines. The winemakers have said that it will always be a 50:50 blend (political expedience seems to trump winemaking nuance) so its release is hardly a triumph of skilful blending. Yet it was good enough for one reviewer to opine: “Like the fusion of two raw metals in the blend that makes the alloy, this is a genuine – and, crucially, a genuinely transformatory – synthesis. Therein lies its essential alchemy.”

And its price tag? £2,500. Given a bottle of Grange costs around £500 and La Chapelle £150, for that price, I could buy them separately, perform the magical 50:50 blend myself, and have four bottles of this “genuinely transformatory synthesis”. But then I guess a review from my kitchen wouldn’t carry quite as much kudos as one from Paris’s Hotel de Crillon.

↓

Due deference

As a former editor of Decanter, I know all about the need to pay due deference. One can hardly go cap in hand to an A-list producer for advertising, or to host a reader event, if you’ve just slammed its wine (I remember Steven Spurrier once asking for permission to give Château Margaux a mere four stars).

And of course you have to review the big names, to bolster the SEO and show that you were in the room. But does any consumer come to this sort of content and feel like its author is really on their side as a result?

It’s the same with retailers, who tend to feel the need to employ the purpliest of prose to match the equally inflated prices of such wines. Yet at a recent Areni Global seminar, held at Berry Bros & Rudd, exploring how the under-40s find their way into fine wine, we were told that one of the biggest obstacles for this demographic is access. That and money. By putting these wines on a pedestal, the industry is only reinforcing such barriers. “Look – we have access, you don’t.”

Not all critics are guilty of such vanity, I should say. My colleague on these pages Tim Atkin MW has long shied away from trumpeting trophy wines, while Jancis Robinson MW squirrelled away her Sassicaia verdict (a modest 17++) without undue fanfare. I was equally heartened on reading Oz Clarke extolling “one of the best tasting days of winter”, to discover that he was referencing the Wines of Portugal event rather than anything more gilded. For it is tastings such as these, uncovering underpriced gems from unknown producers and unfamiliar grape varieties, that are of most use to 99% of consumers – not worshipping at the altar of the 1%.

Image Credit: iStock.com

• Reviews
• Reviewers
• Price Tag
• Deference
• Trophy Wines
• The 1%