Gault Millau

I'd like to point out one more aspect of the Gault-Millau debate, namely that the way scores come about plays an important part in the sorts of arguments that can be made against a wine guide.

Gault Millau tastes openly, that is to say every taster knows which wine he is about to score. That has a positive side, as a wine can of course be appreciated more fairly when you have some context to go with it, some experience of the kind of quality that a certain producer has shown in the long range, and other things. The negative side is this: Faced with one producer's range of wines, any taster will tend to give scores that reflect the hierarchy of quality that the pricing suggests, rather than a strictly objective evaluation of every individual wine.

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).

You may be aware of Gault Millau as a restaurant guide, but they also publish Wine Guide Deutschland, the "definitive guide to German wine". Today, a group of leading German winemakers has announced that it will not only stop sending their wines to Gault Millau, they also refuse to even have their wineries listed in the wine guide.

The list of winemakers who have signed the open letter reads like a who is who of German wine: Helmut Dönnhoff, grand master of Riesling, Knipser, who had just won the title "vintner of the year", Pinot Noir experts Dr. Heger and Meyer-Näkel, Josef Leitz (famously called "our friend Josi" by wine merchants Pinard de Picard) and Heymann-Löwenstein, who has redefined the Wine Rambler's understanding of what mineral means in a Riesling, to name just a few.