Learning from somms
Great time yesterday tasting wine over lunch at a fabulous restaurant, The Loft, at the Montage Resort in Laguna Beach. “Fancy-schmancy,” my grandma Rose would have called it. Chef Casey Overton’s food rocked; the pairings were excellent. Our guests were about a dozen local somms and retailers. The hours flew by and the conversation never lagged, so I guess you’d say it was a success. I certainly enjoyed myself.
It always amazes me that professionals on the retail side of things are so interested in my former job as a wine critic. I mean, I’m there to talk about the wines, the vineyards, the winemakers and so on. There are certainly great stories to tell. But people want to hear about the nuts and bolts of the critic’s job. How do you taste? How do you score? These are things of great interest, I guess, but it’s all the more strange to me given that most somms have a natural (and perfectly understandable) antipathy to critics. They (somms) work really hard to master their trades, and then in comes some customer who wants the latest 100-point wine, instead of depending on the somm’s latest insights.
That would annoy me, too.
I think for somms, and better retailers, the critics basically landed their jobs through a combination of luck and maybe some skill, but certainly not the skill set that a sommelier develops, especially one who’s deep into the certification process. They look at critics and think “That guy doesn’t know nearly as much as I do about [fill in the blank], and yet he’s got more influence on consumers than I’ll have in a lifetime.” This is a profound truth, and there is an element of unfairness. At the same time, it’s life—reality—the way things are—so the somms have to deal with it. Perhaps some of the fascination with the critic’s job is because most critics seem like remote beings, up on some pedestal or magic mountain or something. They’re not really human: they’re brands. There’s the Robert Parker brand, the Jim Laube brand, the Antonio Galloni brand, and, up until last year, the Steve Heimoff brand. I don’t think that’s the way any of us planned it, or even wanted it, but it’s how things turned out.
For myself, one of the biggest challenges of being branded was to try to put people at their ease. But we (all of us; the media, buyers, consumers) have elevated critics to such high levels that they can almost seem like gods. This is understandable in part because we have given over to the critics one of the most fundamental parts of our minds—the ability to make judgments—a part of our mind that really should never be entrusted to someone else. And then, in order to justify this abdication of our own judgment-making capacity, we convince ourselves that the critics must have some insight into the divine—must be in touch with something greater than we can comprehend—otherwise how could we live with ourselves, knowing we’ve entrusted our judgment to a mere mortal?
Of course, that’s nonsense. Critics aren’t divine, any more than anyone else. But the psychology of how we think and make decisions and feel about ourselves is at play here. These are enormous stakes, of enormous interest to people who think about such things, so it’s only natural that these somms and retailers would want to know more about how a critic thinks. We’re all trying to make sense of our world, aren’t we?
All of which makes me wonder about the future of critics. Will they always be with us? Will they go away? If they do, to whom will the public turn for advice? We are at a crucial crossroads here. The public is more confused than ever, what with the proliferation of wine brands, but at the same time they’re more ornery than ever. Older wine drinkers, who are rapidly fading away, are more conservative, but younger ones—bless their souls—are adventurous. This means that any winery can be famous for fifteen minutes. The question is, how does a winery achieve brand loyalty? This is the biggest question the industry faces going forward.
