Gault Millau Wine Guide and the critics, continued
The German wine community is in uproar (well, a little). Hundreds of Twitter messages or blog comments are addressing the conflict between the Gault Millau WineGuide and a group of vintners. As is often the case with the blogosphere, most repeat what they have read in other blogs and the discussion can become a little self-referential. However, there are two reasons why I am revisiting this topic today: some of the more knowledgeable bloggers do indeed have a few interesting comments; also, most of the discussion is in German, so it will be hard to follow for our international readers.
The first posting I would like to summarise is Werner Elflein's (yes, this is German for 'little elf') article Quo vadis Wineguides? - published three weeks ago. Elflein starts with a few comments on the structural crisis of the media and the problems wine guides have to make a profit. He argues that winemakers do profit much more from the work of professional tasters than many of them realise and that it is often the producers of third or fourth rank who complain about unfair treatment (Wine Rambler addendum: this does obviously not apply to the winemakers who signed the Gault Millau letter).