My friend Tish, aka William Tisherman, is a New York wine journalist who passionately opposes the use of scores with wine recommendations. We have debated the merits ad nauseum and have agreed to disagree. I use scores, I believe they have value and I do not plan to abandon scores anytime soon.
Recently, however, Tish has taken a tact on the use of scores with which I can agree. He is part of a movement in New York City that encourages wine merchants to eschew the published scores from the wine mags in favor of promotional prose that draws upon their own expertise.
Truth be told, that’s how I learned the basics in my earliest years as a wine enthusiast. As a young sportswriter living and working in Manhattan, I visited real brick and mortar wine shops and picked the brains of some of the finest wine merchants in the city. This was some 40 years ago, long before RP and WS, and it was the greatest wine education money could buy.
There’s no question something was lost when wine buyers moved away from small, neighborhood wine shops to big-box stores with broader selections and lower prices. If you buy your wines at a grocery store, a giant big-box store such as Costco, or a liquor store, you’re not likely to find anyone on staff who can answer your questions about a wine’s taste or structure, or recommend a wine to serve at your Saturday night dinner party.
Visit a neighborhood wine merchant and you stand a much better chance of finding just the right wine for you. This is still the best way to buy wine and I applaud Tish for championing the cause.
But here’s the rub: That’s not the reality for most wine buyers. In the state of California, where I live now, sales at grocery store chains and the likes of Costco drive the retail wine business. The average person buys wine when they’re also out shopping for food. The average person knows what they like when they taste it, but half of them can’t remember the name of the wine, the winery or the vintage when you ask them.
That’s the person who needs the shelf-talker with a useful description of what’s in the bottle. If a decent score from a reputable reviewer would help close the deal, the retailer would be foolish not to use it.
I don’t understand why some people have a problem with that. There is nothing inherently evil about scoring a wine in a review. Any score I attach to a wine is simply a measure of my enthusiasm for that wine. Think of it as an applause meter. The higher the number, the more I liked it.
Is there something really so bad about that?
Follow Robert on Twitter at @wineguru.
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