What Not to Drink
Thursday 20 October
Journalists, me included, are told by our editors to provide readers with wine recommendations. What about telling our readers what not to drink, a la Trinny and Susannah’s What Not to Wear.
Over the past two weeks, I have been judging Metro magazine’s top 100 wines for summer with various industry members. While we hear a lot about award-winning New Zealand wines, there is certainly a lot of crap that has to be weeded out.
Our panel tasted more than 120 wines on day one and found just five worthy of anything as high as a silver medal. There were a lot of poorly made wines, and some of our panels’ notes read, ‘smells like a raw potato’, ‘really? Why did they bother?’, ‘alcoholic lolly water’ and ‘a bit ratty’, as in it smelled like a dead rat.
Surely readers should be warned of such dross to avoid having to drink raw potatoes and dead rat wines? I reckon more people would read the column too, instead of getting bored with the same old ‘these wines are great’ every week.
This sounds like more of the snobby, damaging, pretentious nonsense we get from a lot of self proclaimed wine writers who have never grown a grape or made a decent drop themselves and probably never could! We dont want to know what you dont want to drink as everyone is different with varying sensory ability and genetics as well as experience. I often enjoy wines that you dismiss and vice versa! This is typical of any sample of winedrinkers and of gold medal wines that get nothing at the next competition they are entered into. How about a little more humility?
- by lorraine