Conning the Public or Conning Yourself

It’s becoming increasingly obvious that some wine companies are playing ‘under which shell is the pea’ i.e. a bit of a switching con game in relation to the quality of their wine. The switch can take two forms; the first is ‘special bottles’ for review or shows, and the second is differences in batch quality of the same wines over the course of a year.

Let’s look at this in a bit more detail.

It has also long been suspected that some wine companies are providing ‘special’ bottles to wine writers and wine shows.

As an example some time ago in Divine State of Origin Challenge the McGuigan 2000 Genus Shiraz was highly applauded by the judges and many consumers in public tastings held in conjunction with this competition. At that stage the wine was not released. When it finally was available for sale to the public there were cries of disappointment from many of the consumers who purchased the wine. It is believed by many members of the public who tasted the wine prior to release that ‘special’ bottles of the wine were supplied for the Divine tastings. Needless to say the people who tasted the wine at these tastings and subsequently purchased cases of the wine were not impressed when they tasted their purchases. For full details of that saga, click here.

At the National Wine Show in Canberra all wine entered must be finished wines and some are picked at random and purchased from retailers to compare and ensure the ‘shell and pea game’ is held in check. It’s interesting to see how many wines are withdrawn from the show at the last moment.

In terms of ‘special’ bottles submitted to wine scribes, there is absolutely no doubt this happens and last year I was a victim. When I tasted the wine I was informed it was the finished wine that had been blended but not bottled. It was an impressive wine and some months later I purchased a case. The wine I bought certainly seemed different in structure to the wine I wrote up. Interestingly enough, a well known national wine scribe wrote up this same wine later and it looked a lot like the wine I tried, but somewhat different to the wine I had purchased. This scenario whilst not rampant does happen.

The second category of concern is that of batch variation. Over the years there have been a few instances where people buy a bottle of wine and like it. They go back a bit later and buy a case. The case is not as good as the wine they originally tried. Some large (and a few small) wineries will make up different batches of the same wine. (This was part of the problem according to the McGuigan response.) In the case of the majors, it’s possible they may make up many batches of the wines that are sold in case quantities of hundreds of thousands. That’s fine provided the wine is the same and in most cases, especially at the low cost end, that objective is consistently achieved.

Where it becomes a concern is when the batches are different in quality and unfortunately that sometimes happens too.

In all these instances when the consumers expect to get a wine of a certain quality, (especially so when they have tasted it previously) or have a great deal of respect for the opinion of the wine scribe whose advice they are following, and the wine is not up to scratch then one of two people will be wearing the consequences. If it’s the scribe, then the winery loses because they are relying on the scribes ability to get the message across and if they damage that medium of support they eventually wind up shooting themselves in the foot. If it’s the winery, because the consumer has tasted the wine previously, then the winery is shooting itself in the head.

The consumer doesn’t give a rodent’s posterior about the reasons for the difference in quality they will just give a wide berth to that winery in the future. In today’s global village the wineries can not afford consumer backlash. It is this sort of backlash and consumer ground swell that greatly assisted in the gradual acceptance of Stelvins.

The proponents of the pea and shell game with ‘special’ samples may think they are fooling the public but in the long run by not playing by the rules the only people they are fooling are themselves.

Copyright © Ric Einstein 2003