Wine Spectator Rant #1

You know, for years I have purchased the Wine Spectator. I give copies of it to my brother-in-law and a couple of friends for Christmas each year. And I hate it.

I have a hundred rants about why I hate the 'Speculator and I will try to rant on one a week until I get tired of it or run out of complaints, whichever comes first. I would bet it is getting tired.

Rant #1 - Quit covering for wineries that allow Brettanomyces in their wine.

Now I am no winemaker, although I have home-winemade about a dozen wines during my years in California. In my opinion, Brettanomyces, which is a yeast that grows on grapes and in wine, is spoilage, no matter how much you have in the wine. If you ever have a "Bret" wine, you will know it. I have heard it described as wet dog or wet cardboard but I just call in nasty stink. The other night I was drinking a Ridge Mouvedre (they call it Mataro) from 2002 and it reeked of Bret. My wife said I was an idiot for drinking it and I gave in after a half of a glass. I called the winery and they replaced the wine with another vintage, good for them.

For years, the French winemakers, especially in the Rhone and Bordeaux and some Italian winemakers, among others, have allowed this spoilage yeast to proliferate in their wine. They claim it "adds complexity" but I say they are just being cheap and lazy. It tastes like shit and they need to fess up to this. It is no wonder that so many French and Italian wineries are struggling in the global marketplace with many notable ones going under. They are turning out excuses instead of globally recognized and acceptable products.

And now for my rant. The Wine Spectator's European tasters have been covering for this farce for years. To be fair, James Laube, who I detest for his overrating of wines and floating tasting palate, has ranted about American winemakers and chastised them for trying to put one over on us consumers by selling Bret contaminated wine. He recognizes that it all about dollars and cents, consumer beware. But Suckling, Molesworth, Matthews and Marcus, in particular, refuse to point out the same in European wines. Case in point are the 2003 Chateauneuf de Pape wines. CDP vitners are famous for failing to deal with Bret, claiming it adds complexity to the wine. No way, Jose, you are just a lazy Frenchman who has decided to ignore a problem rather than deal with it. Because of ratings in the Spectator, Advocate, etc., I have stocked up on '03 CPD's but have not tried any yet because they are still unsettled and young. But I have read all the reviews. Not a hint of the word Bret in these reviews. However, as I have been doing follow-up research reading wine blogs and the like and it turns out that some of the wines I am paying $70 or more for may be full of the stuff. Pegau CDP Reservee was just rated 97 by the speculator. One tasting I read about in Burlingame, CA said this wine was loaded with Bret, had the most in the tasting. I checked the Spectator review. I had bought my bottles based on it. The closest I could see to Bret was the word "earthy" in the review. Not a damn word about Bret.

If you are going to publish a wine mag in the US to primarily a US audience, you should be required to taste for the US palate. This BS about "earth" does not convey Bret to me and I am going to be really pissed if my Pegau is rotten with Bret. The Spectator needs to start calling wineries on Bret and they have a responsibility to provide accurate, honest and US palate based reviews for us to read and utilize. Get yourself some new tasters if they cannot adjust their palates and keep saying Bret is okay. It is not, it is spoiled, spoiled, spoiled and quit bailing out the wineries so they will advertise in your rag magazine. My friends at Ridge recognized the problem and dealt with it. So should those jerkoffs in the EU.

I know that I should stop buying because of someone else's ratings in a wine publication. But come one, you have to look at the press because most of us do not have infinite amounts of money to use on wine. So we are stuck with the mags and they need to stop the bias and be honest with us. I would only hope that Matt Kramer, who seems to be the only non-biased real guy at that magazine, would agree with my crit. If not, screw the whole lot of them. I keep telling my wife I am going to cancel this rag, maybe I will. Who knows.