The importance of wine guides

For some are something old, for others something not to be missed. The wine guides season is open, real reports on Italian wine status. 

For some they are evil, for others they serve no purpose in this era of information technology and then there are those who think the ‘prizes’ given are somewhat suspect. Nevertheless, there are still many wine guides in Italy and they have their market which, if you add up all the copies that have been printed, sold and distributed in various ways the number is quite significant and over 200,000.

And then if you add in the foreign language editions, related apps and e-book downloads the number climbs significantly. But at the end of the day the question remains what are they exactly and what purpose do they serve? For the most part, these guides are authentic research analyses on the state of Italian wine. They are like the in-depth reports you find in the press and on televisions programs of various political or ‘philosophical’ persuasions that in the end can draw some distinctly different conclusions. And this should not be surprising although it is often used as a thinly veiled way discredit an opposing view when, in fact, each is in the end only a matter of opinion and thus something democratic. Human nature being what it is, there are those who will seek to impose opinions in order to benefit financially, small acts performed by small minds. The bottom line is that guides are, in any case, attempts to inform the public by rating wines and wineries while at the same time giving background and interpreting more than judging. I do not wish to bang my own drum here but in my professional career I have worked on three different wine guides for a total of 29 editions and so I feel qualified to say that, despite all their limits and defects, wine guides have played an important role for expanding knowledge of the wine world. For sure, there may indeed be too many prizes, the language and terms used are not always immediately comprehensible and some guides, in fact, have an excessive ‘ideological’ bias. But the same could be said about other publications and if you look at many of the introductions to art catalogues, for example, you will find them to be even more self-referential. This, of course, is no justification but just a recognition of a common flaw found in similar publications. The coming weeks will see opening of the season of presenting this year’s new wine guides. We will kick ours off on October 1, in Milan, and this will be followed by those of Espresso, Gambero Rosso, Slow Wine, Bibenda and so on. Each will take place with an important tasting open to the public which will offer an occasion to verify the guidelines used in the massive and often difficult job of compiling a guide by extremely competent people. It will also allow you to decide which guide you like the best and which corresponds to your personal tastes and opinions. Because, in the end, the importance and purpose of wine guides is that they perform a public service.