PANEL-BEATERS - The Perils of Competitions and Blind Tastings
There is currently much debate about the point of competitive blind tastings and whether the results should not be taken with a considerable pinch of sediment. In view of recent declamatory pronouncements about what is good, what is better and what is best perhaps we should thought we should wade in with our groat’s worth of homespun.
The fact is classic wines are routinely trounced by so-called ringers in tasting competitions; buxom New World beauts repeatedly walk all over Olde Worlde crusties and that excites baying controversy amongst critics and consumers alike. Should we be bovvered? Should we give a fudge for a fudge? Do critical tongues start clacking because a wine with a theoretically humbler reputation is graded higher than the seigneurial one, or because the tasters cannot tell the difference between the two wines in a blind tasting? A further conundrum rests in the hypothetical question: Would you score a wine differently if you knew its exact provenance? If answer is yes then we must admit that an important part of tasting is an a priori knowledge of what it is the bottle. If the answer is no then the marking system is purely dependent on the relative strengths and the weaknesses of the tasters, themselves a bundle of prejudices and preferences, their palates conditioned by certain received wisdoms about what is correct or what is good. Thus, whilst such tastings are interesting exercises, the results are essentially meaningless because the truth is, as usual, far more complex that the headlines indicate. If the excuse is that this is the best
Michael Broadbent refers in his writings to the “arc of a [particular] wine”. Blind tasting is merely a blinding snapshot of a wine; it is, by definition, limited by the flawed framework within which it is conducted. Blind tasting, as I have said, denies us essential information when we are evaluating a wine; partly because it ignores the fact that we should be judging the wine against itself as much as against other wines. When we taste in competition how rarely do we assess the ultimate potential of the wine and, instead, merely reflect how it shows at a given moment in time?
Comparing wines is a tricky and somewhat redundant exercise in any case. How can one confidently assert, for example, that an Argentinean Malbec is better than a version from Cahors when they are so demonstrably different in style? How should one even compare two wines from, say, two different Puligny vineyards, or similar wines from two different vintages, especially if those wines express the nature of the vineyard or the vintage in question to the maximum of their ability? It is presumptuous to declare that one wine is better than another unless you take into account every single determining factor for that wine. Knowledge of the wine helps us to understand why the wine tastes the way it does; without such information one is expressing a personal preference of a particular style. The nature of big wine competitions is to dissolve our perceptions of the value of the wine’s identity by putting all wines into one anonymous melting pot.
Not only is the system flawed but I would also dispute whether the jury system works. The intention may be to promote fairness and eliminate prejudice, but the collective nature of the decision-making ultimately begets shallow compromise - the wine which often scores highest is not necessarily the best wine, but the wine people least disagree on. Moreover, the qualities that earn medals in wine competitions are not necessarily the qualities to be found in great wine, precisely because the average taster is looking for the showiest wine at a given moment. Look at a trophy winning wine and a definite archetype emerges: it tends to be proportionate with plush, aromatic fruit, emollient tannins. Lots of oak, sweetness and plenty of extraction are also apparently an advantage.
Tasters are naturally comfortable with wines that they can instantly understand and identify. It is no coincidence that gratifying wines are manufactured to win competitions; these tricked up comfits and prinked bagatelles are made for the instantaneous recognition and appreciation. In that instant the winning wine is much as a muscular sprinter powering to the finish; yet the greater wine can be a long distance runner, hanging back, conserving its energy.
Even the environment of the big wine tasting is far from ideal. It bears no correspondence to the way we experience wine. When we are at home we can taste wine at the right temperature, we can carafe it, and we can put it aside and return to it later. Most of all we can experience it, as nature intended, with food. We can take time to formulate an opinion; we can also change our mind. The narrative trajectory of wine is one that charts our organic relationship with the wine and also recognises the wine’s intrinsic capacity to change and develop for the better (or the worse). This flexibility is what tasting should be all about.
Each great wine has a unique, complex signature and demands a certain kind of concentration from the taster. You rarely achieve true understanding by cursory interview; whilst extrovert wines are necessarily more forthcoming, does that mean that they are better than introvert wines? Of course not. We don’t judge intelligence and profundity by who makes the loudest noise. I believe that good wine is syndetic, by which I mean that it possesses internal structure and is a weave of complex connections and correspondences. It is ontogenous (capable of maturation); it is mutable; it resists facile comparison and simple categorisation.
None of this would matter remotely if the results of competitions weren’t being used as a marketing tool to promulgate the qualities of particular wines. When the boutique Chilean wine Sena achieved a higher ranking from journalists than Latour, Lafite and Margaux in a blind tasting in Berlin in 2004 the results were picked over like the entrails of a sacrificial chicken. Did this result mean that Sena was the most incontestably wonderful thing since the last shooting star or that the big three first growths had miserably underperformed? Or did the truth lie somewhere in between? Or was this condign evidence that the journalists didn’t know their Alsace from their Elbling? Or that tastings are a complete irrelevance? Furthermore, it begged the question, that if Sena was itself defeated in the future by a humble impostor in some other blind tasting, would that necessarily mean that that wine was better than messrs Latour, Lafite and Margaux? Hierarchical competitions are futile and comparisons are truly invidious.