When “Yes” Means “No”

Should we pity the poor wine scribe? Can you imagine a more thankless task than sitting in judgment on some paranoid winemaker's pride and joy? How could you win? Where would you start?

Honesty, the oft-recommended policy in everyday life, acquires a multitude of different nuances in the dangerous world inhabited by your humble wine reviewer. For example, it is commonplace for the "blunt" and the "definite" components of old-fashioned honesty to mysteriously shuffle into the back row of the dress circle during the construction of the review, while the non-committal euphemism rushes headlong into the front stalls.

Now don't get me wrong, they both have a role to play in any wine review, it's just that their relative natural positions tend to become less clear. Imagine the reaction from the hopeful vintner to the following "The '2020 Chateau Oz de Visa card is bad. It's so awful that it would, with difficulty, only sell to cane growers in North Queensland. Do not waste your money."

This type of didactic assessment, as transparent and as unambiguous as it is brief, never sees the hard light of newsprint. Very occasionally, in the putative adolescence of the wine writer's career, its ilk may last as far as the sub-editor, but invariably its next home is the cavernous and rapacious round file under the editor’s desk.

In the unreal world of the wine review, the laws of libel can have a tremendous influence on one’s palate. If for some political reason a review is unavoidable, the illustrated pages of the Monthly Magnanimous are far more likely to report that "the '2020 Chateau Oz de Visa card is an unusual style of wine which fully reflects the skills of Chief Winemaker, Norman Crun; and although there was some discussion amongst the panel about merits of the innovative level of volatile acidity in the sample we tasted, the wine seems to be popular across North Queensland, where a great deal of money is expended upon it".

With most wine reviews, it's what's between the lines which really counts. While the industry credibility of the scribe is worth noting, it is just that...an acceptance by the wine industry that the pen only gilds the lily in industry-accepted ways. And it's an unspoken long-standing deal which says that each reviewer will approach each wine review knowing the rules. In every industry, there are strict rules in the reviewing business which are seldom broken. After all, if any wine scribe is truly independent of the industry they'll have to put their money where their palate is and pay for samples as they require them. Indeed, fulsome praise for one particular wine by inference puts a competitor’s effort in the same market niche under a cloud, so free samples from the opposition may become a real issue if the aggrieved winery doesn't adhere to industry-accepted protocols.

In a business where a market image is meticulously built over years, to be totally ignored is often preferable to faint praise. Adequate is as adequate does, and yes, there's no doubt about it, at least in the politically incorrect world of the wine review, "yes" can often indicate any number of levels of meaning all the way down to "no".