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Blog de Blogs
This week’s look at the world of wine blogging unearths a conspiracy of X-Files proportions and wades in to the middle of a fight among the wine writing community, but happily ends on a little song.
Oliver Styles mounts his soapbox in his latest blog, accusing wine writers of having no backbone and being unwilling to stick their neck out: “Wine writers lack balls,” he boldly proclaims, attacking their “unending positivity” towards their subject.
He goes on to dub wine hacks “a bunch of touts whose endless paeans to the bottles they taste are only limited by the number of bottles produced worldwide,” blaming their lack of gumption on the fact that the wine world is so small, meaning negative comments will invariably come back to haunt them.
It’s an interesting point. Steadfast subjectivity and freedom of speech are indeed rare in the wine world – who is lucky enough to be able to flourish as a wine writer completely independently of the wine trade, save for perhaps Styles himself?
The idea of wine writers being scared of their colleagues disagreeing with them is also thrown into the ring by a very gung-ho Styles, who goes on to lament the lack of Mark Kermodes and AA Gills in wine writing, who are unafraid to trash a bad film or meal if they deem it justified.
“Where do wine lovers go to find a lambasting review?" he rages. "Where do they find a frothy-mouthed critic storming out of a tasting?”
Styles rounds off his argument by calling for more transparency from natural wine advocates into who they think are the culprits producing additive-fuelled industrialised wines. Styles calls it a “cop-out” that those who write about natural wines fail to mention their adversaries. “Come on, give us names: tell us who your enemy is.”
The blog has generated a heated discussion on Styles’ comments board.
The doctor (aka Tyler Colman) has always sensed a conspiracy afoot, and a recent study has given him the opportunity to blow the whistle.
“Sometimes you need a study to affirm what you suspect,” he writes. “Such is the case with a recent paper that shows wine labels to understate actual alcohol by at least 0.3 percentage points, on average. And increasing alcohol levels have little to do with climate change in aggregate; instead, the researchers suggest, it results from winemaker choice.”
In the manner of Fox Mulder seeking to rip up a carpet of lies at FBI headquarters, Dr Vino highlights the findings of an examination of 129,123 wine samples led by lead author Julian Alston of UC Davis, which used a large proportion of data from the Liquor Control Board of Ontario from 1992-2009 to compare the abv stated on wine labels to what actually appears in the bottle. The resultant paper was published by the American Institute of Wine Economists.
“Using climate data,” the doctor writes, “Alston et al. find that the heat index in most wine countries grew less than rise in alcohol levels – to explain a rise of wine percentage point in the alcohol of a wine, a 20 degree Fahrenheit increase would need to be seen, which obviously didn’t happen in the time frame. Thus, they conclude not all that surprisingly, that their findings ‘lead us to think that the rise in alcohol content of wine is primarily man-made.’”
Colman’s Clouseau-shaming sleuthing then leads him to the revelation that “57% of the nearly 100,000 samples understated the alcohol level, with the worst offending category being New World red wine.” According to the doctor, Alston’s study panel then procedes to accuse winemakers of blatantly lying to consumers. “This speculation is based in part on informal discussions with some winemakers who have admitted that they deliberately chose to understate the alcohol content on a wine label, within the range of error permitted by the law, because they believed that it would be advantageous for marketing the wine to do so.”
The authors of the report conclude: “What remains to be resolved is why consumers choose to pay winemakers to lie to them.” But are they even aware they are being lied to? Are the regulatory bodies at fault for allowing such flagrant misinformation to permeate the wine trade? The truth is out there…
Have you ever been presented with a range of vintages, either in a shop or in your cellar, and suddenly found your usually knowledgeable self stumped as to what needs drinking and what needs keeping?
Well fear not, Debra Meiburg MW has come up with a helpful ditty spanning 1990 to 2005.
With a bit of application you’ll always remember that “2002 is classic and true, though right bank suffered as weather was cool”, or indeed that “96 has all the right tricks; dense, focused and ripe – the crtics’ top pick”.
One to store alongside your mnemonic verse of English monarchs. Altogether now: “Willie, Willie, Harry, Stee…”
db, 31.05.2011