The Season of Guides

Every year in October and November the leading wine guides come out in Italy and France. Today I wish to focus on the Italian ones since yours truly was for years responsible for and perhaps even the mentor to one of these guides, one that still today is the most emblematic and incisive: Gambero Rosso.

First a little historical background. Guides as we known them today date back to 1987 when Gambero Rosso’s and Veronelli’s Le Cantine came out practically at the same time. The latter was a direct heir to the Catalog of Italian Wines which was first published by Bolaffi and later by Giorgio Mondadori. These publications, both invented by Gino Veronelli, were the forerunners of the ‘modern’ guides. More or less at the same time the Guide Hachette came out in France and, sometime later, the Penin guide in Spain. In the United States and Britain publishers prefer magazines to guides and at most they will come out with a special edition that ends up being a collection of the snap reviews and ratings accumulated during the course of the year. Bibenda’s Duemilavini (2000 wines) and the Espresso guide came out in 1999 and 2000, respectively, while Slow Food’s guide is the newest and was first published in 2010, after they split from Gambero Rosso.

Each guide has its own philosophy, point of view and technical convictions but what they all have in common is that they are the result of a lengthy, annual examination of the leading Italian wines involving tasting panels that evaluate thousands of samples from thousands of producers who offered their wines to be rated by this or the other guide. Needless to say, there are always polemics, protests and various ‘cahiers de doleance’. But in the end these guides continue to play an important role in providing information. While it may be true that fewer are being sold than in the past, this is a phenomenon common to the whole printed media sector and is due to the creation of other sources of information and forums for discussion, the Web first among them. But it is also true that the Web today is rife with discussions about the various prizes being awarded to wines and on the evaluations made by the various guides.

The consensus now seems to be that the ‘everyone is a winner’ approach may be running its course. Too many prizes in the end means no prize at all, something along the lines of Hegel’s observation that all cows are black at night. However, more prizes also mean more copies of guides sold to producers and more wineries ready to pay to take part in promotional events, no small feat considering the crisis in publishing and advertising. Nevertheless, all this does not take anything away from the fact that the wines awarded prizes, in my opinion, deserve them and the immense work by those who contributed to creating the various guides pays off, above all for wine lovers and consumers.