Wine Buying Guides: What Are they Good For?
I wish W.R. Tish would write more.
First, his wine experience is deep. For a decade he was the managing editor at Wine Enthusiast Magazine. Second, he’s got a probing mind that combines with a great sense of humor. However, there is very little humor, but lots of probing, in his most recent article for Wines & Vines Magazine that takes a fairly close look at the wine Buying Guides of three major American wine magazines.
Let’s get to the heart of the matter. Tish says:
"the bottom
line of my buying-guide analysis is this: While they purport to be
consumer aids, they are actually far from that. As the buying guides
continue to grow and grow and GROW, consumers are simply confronted
with more and more homogenous-looking ratings and tasting notes of
wines they will never see in their local stores or even their regional
mar-kets. What these major buying guides have actually become is pure (or
impure, depending on your point of view) marketing vehicles designed to
raise both the stature of the magazines that create them as well as the
wines they commend."
I think you have to start with the assumption that reviews are a legitimate sub-genre of the larger wine writing genre. No one will argue with this. Furthermore, I think you have to accept the notion that reviews can be very helpful to consumers now confronted with such a huge boatload of choices that it boggles the mind. This is not to say that all review of wines are equal. Some are clearly more useful than others. But in general I think it’s fair to say they are generally very useful.
So I guess this puts me at odds with Tish insofar as I think Buying Guides and their reviews are "consumer aids" (I hate being at odds with Tish…he usually bests me in discussions of this sort)
However, I can’t disagree with him that Buying Guides at wine publications are INDEED "vehicles designed to raise the stature of…the wines they commend". And in that sense wineries and PR types view them as marketing vehicles. The question in my mind is can a Magazine’s wine buying guide serve legitimate and above board purposes of being consumer aids as well as marketing vehicles for wineries? I think again the answer is, yes.
As Tish points out in his this excellent Part 1 survey of American wine buying guides, we can take issue with the way wines are tasted and presented, if we are so inclined. And most of us usually are. Critiquing the the critics is a blood sport in this industry. But when I think about the value of the Buying Guides to the person with a budge to spend maybe $200 to $500 a month or more on wine and who is still learning about the product, I think these guides serve to pique interests, deliver discoveries and "guide" the buyer.
I don’t pay any attention to any of the buying guides. I have, of course, but in the end can’t see any value in perusing listings of wine that I either 1) can’t afford or 2) will never be able to find regardless of affordability. A better buying guide to me would be one that came directly from a distrubutor or, even better, a retailer. I’m accustomed to viewing tasting notes and “reviews” with a grain of salt — having worked in marketing I view almost everything as propaganda — but I can still see a lot of benefit in a catalog approach. I like “shelf talkers” in store even though I don’t usually trust them because they can provide some clues to a wine that I can actually buy.
Buying guides are useful in that they pique interest for some consumers. However, having been a supplier for the past couple of years and doing a multitude of presentations to retailers, the amount of requests I get for my ratings is disheartening. What the retailer is showing me is that they have next to no interest in the products on their own floor. If they did, they’d bother to know about them in order to actually sell the wines.
The consumer becomes more reliant on the ratings than on their own pallets, and the retailer who asks for these ratings to be put in the form of case cards and shelftalkers feeds into that problem. Experience should be the customers’ ultimate guide – not a wine critic.
When i was drinking the first time wine its oral in taste. But after some time i feel good and now this time i have a lot of collection of wine. I never buy any book just got knowledge on internet.