Bad Wines
Naming the Unnameable
In my sixteen years as the wine columnist of The Wall Street Journal I had the opportunity to taste a great deal of wine. Most of the time the wines were pretty good, very occasionally they were very good but often, they weren’t good at all. In fact, they were bad. But because my column was limited to 1,200 or so words, there wasn’t enough room to acknowledge all of the wines that I tasted, so I almost always noted just the wines that I liked. Listing the bad wines was deemed to be of limited service to readers. Readers wanted to know what they SHOULD buy - not what they should avoid. Or at least the presumption was that they wanted a (much) longer list of the former than the latter. But as every reviewer/critic (and reader) will probably agree- it’s so much more fun to write- and to read- about things that are truly bad. Take, for example the famous Pete Wells NYT review of Guy Fieri’s Times Square restaurant Guy’s American Kitchen. Absolute genius and so much fun to read. Google it if you haven’t read it. It’s just terrific. (Side note: Before Pete- who I greatly admire - became the New York Times Restaurant Critic we were colleagues at Food & Wine magazine years ago - prior to my joining WSJ. Indeed, I was the one who assigned Pete his first-ever F&W piece - on Madeira.) He’s a first-rate writer but Pete’s favorable reviews are so much less memorable to me- not because they’re not well-written, they’re just not as much fun. But as to the bad wines. I was thinking about all-those-bad wines I tasted and dumped over the years. I once had the idea of writing an annual column that would include a list of Wines Not to Buy. Would that be of service to readers? Perhaps not. But one of my most recent- and as it turned out- near-to-last columns featured a wine (shown below) that I did not recommend. I wouldn’t -and didn’t- call it “bad” but I did call it “hugely overrated” and “overpriced.” It was one of my most-read columns. Which, I think proves my point. What do you think? Would you want to read about wines Not to Buy?
I once consulted on a wine guide to Georgia and tasted hundreds if not thousands of wines and 85% of the wines were not just not good they were awful. And I wish I could have written about it.
I think that there are so many bad wines out there, it is natural and normal to focus on the ones that have something uplifting to offer.
I would never bother to trash an obscure producer. BUT if a wine somehow vaunted for its reputation, and is asking an extraordinary price, it is not only fair game but relevant and a service to know how and when they fall short.
I remember that Guy Fieri review and it was brilliant. But I seldom read such cutting reviews about the emptiness of Michelin starred celebrity chefs serving $250 lunches.