Jancis Robinson: your smartphone is competing us, professionals
10 Jan 2019
Jancis Robinson : when your smartphone competes with me and other expert tasters
Only once in my life I thought I knew everything there was to know about wine. It was in 1978, after completing a two-year course at the Wine & Spirit Education Trust. Thanks to a little luck and a certain diligence in high school I was the best student of my year, and I thought I could call myself an expert with that diploma in my pocket.
The following years I learned how much there is still to learn. But I have to admit, after forty years of writing about wine, that many people consider me an expert in this field. However, I am well aware of how much the concept of competence and experience is changing in this age of immediate communication and social (often antisocial) media.
The "Parker system
In the last twenty years of the 20th century, when it took more than a nanosecond to communicate, the world's greatest wine experts were seen as practical oracles. The most striking case is that of the American Robert Parker Jr., who from 1977 imposed a system of classification of wines on a scale of 1 to 100, making it wonderfully easy, regardless of the mother tongue, to "understand" the wine, or at least to understand which wine he thought was the best. The evaluation system also allowed those who sold the wine to a third party to show only numbers, almost all between 89 and 101. Parker could make the fortune or setbacks of wines and wine shops with the same power as the most renowned theatre or gastronomic critics.
The role of experts "dismantled" from the Internet
At the time, wine was one of those subjects on which ordinary people in English-speaking countries were reluctant to express an opinion. We were the experts who could tell simple enthusiasts what to think and with what words to describe these thoughts. But today wine has definitively lost its elitist patina.
In the 21st century, the Internet and then the smartphone in particular revolutionized the world. Wine lovers can compare different ratings, not only at home but also in the wine shop and restaurant. Applications such as Vivino and Delectable are designed to offer all possible and imaginable information about a single wine, often including critical reviews, simply by pointing the phone at the label. Winesearcher.com has provided valuable price comparisons and supplier information for individual wines and wine stores around the world since 1999, and has now added rating averages and launched its own label scan app.
CellarTracker.com, founded in 2003 by an ex-Microsoft wine lover, has greatly contributed to the transfer of power from experts to the drinking public: now it offers free tasting forms with scores compiled by over 100 thousand enthusiasts (since last year it also has its own label scanning app, along with Vivino). It must be said that CellarTracker also takes into account the reviews and evaluations of various sites of specialized wine journalists, including mine, but it is probably the weight of consumer opinion as opposed to that of experts that makes CellarTracker so popular.
Word-of-mouth advertising has become the most powerful sales tool on the planet
Since word of mouth has become the most powerful sales tool on earth, thanks to the exponential strengthening of social media, what role do those of us who earn our living by giving our competent opinion in this new, democratic and much fuller panorama of opinions play?
Unlike Robert Parker, I never thought there was one "right" objective opinion for every wine. Even apart from the problem of the huge differences that can exist between bottles of the same wine, in some cases due to storage conditions, I have always insisted that the tasting of a wine depends so much on the sensory equipment of the individual, not to mention its predictions and sensitivities, that it is inevitably destined to be subjective, regardless of the reliability with which we professionals can assess aspects such as sweetness, acidity, tannins and alcohol content and identify technical defects.
Tasting is always subjective
Even in the latter case there are huge differences between individuals in sensitivity to different chemical compounds at the origin of these defects. For example, some professionals cannot understand which wines taste cork-like or are contaminated with cork because they are insensitive to trichloanisole, the chemical compound responsible.
Tasting is always subjective
Even in the latter case there are huge differences between individuals in sensitivity to different chemical compounds at the origin of these defects. For example, some professionals cannot understand which wines taste cork-like or are contaminated with cork because they are insensitive to trichloanisole, the chemical compound responsible. Similarly, each of us has a different number of taste buds to use in the tasting process. In 1994 the experimental psychologist Linda Bartoshuk coined the flammable term "super taste buds" for people who have more taste buds than average and are particularly sensitive to bitter flavors.
Today's wine market is busier than ever. As wine production changes from agriculture to bucolic plutocratic madness, and wine drinking becomes a status indicator on all continents (Asia is the most recent and striking example), consumers are faced with a disorienting array of choices. And, the producers who work every year to make a better and better wine to stay on the square must also shout louder and louder to be noticed.
I realize it's hard to believe, but tasting wine is a tiring job: it's something very different from the relaxation and joy I personally associate with drinking, the wine. Tasting requires absolute concentration and a mind as open as the mouth, and above all it requires the nose, for new aromas, new styles and new developments. The prejudice of certain producers, grape varieties and names can be terrible: therefore, I prefer to taste blindly, where possible, without knowing the exact identity of each wine.
Tasting up to 100 wines a day - The total abstainer
Tasting is a physically exhausting activity, especially if you, like me, want to give drinkers information about as many wines and tastings as possible. That's why I often taste up to 100 wines a day. While this puts me in the spotlight of the people who recently sounded the alarm in Britain about the dangers of drinking alcohol in middle age, I would like to point out that when we taste a wine, we professionals see alcohol as the enemy. We are not looking for any kind of drunkenness: we want our senses to remain as sharp as possible and therefore we try to spit out the wine we taste to the last drop. (Contrary to popular belief, there is no organ in the throat to taste; and several of the world's most renowned wine tasters, such as Katsuyuki Tanaka, are total abstainers.) […]
But tasting in a balanced, attentive and accurate way is only half of what it takes to do our work. It is also difficult, if not more difficult, to find the right words to describe the wine. I like to focus on the aspects of wine: how strong is it? How rough is it? How strong is it? How sweet is it? How immediate is it? And I describe only the most obvious aromas, because when I write I always have the consumer in mind and I know how variable the flavour equipment of each of them is. But a lack of critics is not only the inflation of the scores (before 85 was considered a good grade: today, to sell well, a wine must be over 90): there is also the inflation of the number of flavors listed in the tasting plates. This is particularly true of reviews in the United States, where it is now common to find critics who identify 10 different flavors in a single liquid, some of which are at least questionable (does anyone like a little grilled watermelon?).
The abundance of aromas
David Laing, an Australian scientist from the University of New South Wales, specialising in the study of taste, conducted an experiment in 1989 in which he demonstrated that people had great difficulty identifying more than four different aromas in one liquid. And when he tried a similar experiment in 1996 on experts who earned their living with aromas and fragrances, it turned out that they were better than amateur tasters at identifying mixtures of two and three components, but that when it came to four components, the results were identical.
From the grilled watermelon to the gardenia
If some of my colleagues are really able to see grilled watermelon, star anise, black raspberry, fennel seed, oolong tea, gardenia, sandalwood, mandarin, rose petals and fresh thyme in one wine, as an enterprising reviewer did recently, then I take my hat off. But my impression is that in this busy arena of opinions where we all try to make ourselves heard (or at least read), an increasing number of wine reviews are being written to offer something to producers and retailers.
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