Is Wine Bullshit? James responds

Alex Mayyasi’s blog is proof positive that wine bloggers are, by and large, distinguished by their abysmal lack of knowledge, whether they are blogging about some specific aspect of wine, or making sweeping judgements about wine in general.

He leaps from one point to the next, and having started with the proposition that wine is bullshit and that experts cannot tell good wine from bad, comes to a conclusion that, on its face, makes everything he has written on the way through incorrect or misleading.  There is always the wonderful use of unqualified generalisations attributed to ‘critics’, without any way of testing whether the critics in question are the real deal, or posers.

It is true that most European judges at wine shows are woefully trained compared to Australian wine show judges; in Europe, the points go off to a computer, and there is no discussion between the judges on the merits (or lack thereof) on any given wine.  All care and no responsibility.

But when it is said that Hodgson’s research covered the results of hundreds of wine competitions, the red alert flashes.  The task of identifying a single wine, and working out whether it came up once, twice or a hundred times, would require a very sophisticated and expensive tracking system which, by definition, could not then cross-correlate the identities of the judges in the hundreds of competitions.

Mayyasi then gets lost in a forest of contradictory statements when he deals with the proposition ‘taste does not equal your taste buds.’ There are a couple of true propositions, and the occasional correct conclusion, but his blog all adds up to a score of 80 points on a 100 point scale.

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