Don’t take your wine writers too seriously. If they tell you not to drink some drop to which you have taken like a desert-weary camel might take to like an oasis, don’t believe them. Go on buying the stuff and enjoying it. You are the master of your own palate and that’s all there is to it. Wine people get so used to delivering their opinions it’s easy for them to forget that there are plenty of people out there who don’t actually spend all their time making sure they drink only perfect wine. Indeed, the concept of a perfect wine is simply irrelevant to most wine drinkers. If there’s something about a wine that they like, they will and should go on buying it, irrespective of what a critic might say. But there’s a fine line for a critic to tread. The other week I was sitting opposite a group of keen, interested solicitors from a large Melbourne law office. Several had wine interests on the Mornington Peninsula, or had close friends who did. One, and presumably quite a senior member of the firm, asked me about ‘all the classic cabernets now being grown’ on the same Peninsula. Perhaps a little rashly, or else by trying too hard to be honest, I said I was from the school that believed most Peninsula cabernet vines should be replaced with chardonnay or pinot noir without further delay. I think I lost him from that moment on. Then, on discovering I was about to pass around some Victorian shiraz, circa 1991, another senior member to the party made an impromptu, but impassioned speech about how it would be virtually impossible to imagine anything other than a perfect wine from any bottle of Victorian shiraz, 1991 vintage. Each and every one was simply magnificent, he assured the group. Well, my wine wasn’t. Not even close. So far indeed from magnificent I couldn’t even pretend, so I didn’t. And another of my audience tuned out. A few moments later a female member of the audience made the comment that too many chardonnays were wood-aged and that oak simply got in the way of good fruit. Unwooded chardonnay was, she observed, the only way to go. Now it’s fundamental to the job of a speaker not to deliberately lose or alienate an audience, so here the going became quite tough. To say that I am outspoken concerning the pretensions made by many and various people about unwooded chardonnay is something of an understatement. But a speaker, especially if appearing under some form of educational banner, has to tell the truth as he sees it. And so followed a brief explanation of the uses and misuses of oak and how the palate structure of chardonnay almost empirically demands it. Speaking even as if treading on glass, I still lost another listener. No wine writer I know would ever deliberately belittle anyone who gained pleasure by regularly tossing down Mornington Peninsula cabernet sauvignon or unwooded chardonnay, or whose enthusiasm for a particular winery, vintage or region exceeded what a wine professional might consider a fair thing. If you like it, drink it, is the credo for most of us. That said, it doesn’t take much research to discover just how much different writers differ in their views towards the same wine. It’s for that reason I rarely ever read what any other critic has written: I’d rather not have the influence. We’re simply passers of opinion, each from our own perspective. And an opinion, whether published in print, over the airwaves or via a modem is only ever going to be an opinion, nothing more absolute than that. Today the interested wine public has every opportunity to choose between their wine writers just as much as they choose their wines. It’s a buyer’s market and, whether I might like it or not, plenty of people are clearly enjoying their purchases of unwooded chardonnay and going back for more. But at the end of the day, all a wine critic has is whatever credibility he or she has been able to muster over the years. So next time you’re fuming with disagreement with what one of us might have written, or else with an answer one might have offered you, don’t take it personally. You’re not about to switch your opinions just to be friendly, so why should we?
