Review of Halliday 2006 Wine Companion

Review of Halliday 2006 Wine Companion (Aug 18)

Last week's article titled, “Has Halliday Lost the Plot?” was basically an introduction to this story. There are very few wine lovers who do not have a genuine respect for James Halliday, and in many ways, it's justified. He is certainly the most prolific wine reviewer in Australia today and the most influential of our home grown critics. He also has a wealth and depth of experience that is hard to beat.

Halliday's latest 2006 Wine Companion is a voluminous piece of work containing 682 pages, about 60 more than the previous edition. According to the front cover:

there are a 5957 wines rated
172 new wineries
tasting notes for 4414 wines
profiles of 2001 wineries
Vintage rating charts for each region

That's a huge amount of information in anybody's language and it is as complete a book on the Australian wineries that you will find. On the plus side, much of the information is extremely useful and I frequently refer to his past books and no doubt, I will refer to this one frequently too.

The biggest question I'm left asking myself after analysing this book fairly carefully is; “is biggest necessarily best?” If you go back to early Halliday’s editions of the Companion, it came with an optional CD that was extremely useful. (From memory) I seem to remember the first companion boasted tasting notes on about 4,000 wines and the next year there was a whopping increase, to about 5,500. The initial 4,000 tasting notes had been made over a number of years and included verticals on many of Australia's finest wines. The tasting notes, while succinct, were also detailed and provided an excellent picture of what you were likely to find in the bottle. The number of wineries covered, by today's standards was extremely limited.

The information provided in those early works allowed readers to easily align their palate to Halliday's and as a result, nine times out of ten, I knew if I would like a wine or not by his description. Whilst everyone wants to obtain the highest possible quality wine for the lowest number of dollars, the ratings didn't seem all that important, especially when you are looking at purchasing reasonably inexpensive wine, knowing that if the descriptors aligned, it would certainly be drinkable.

In the intervening years, since those early editions of the Companion, the style and nature of the work has seen a quantum change. It is now a case of quantity, which unfortunately has meant a sacrifice to the quality.

No matter how good the wine critic or writer, no one is infallible, everyone has bad days, everyone makes mistakes; and that does not take into account bottle variation which is not the fault of the reviewer, so expecting perfection from a reviewer is pure folly. However, as good as Halliday’s palate still is, looking at his work today; I do not believe the work is as useful as it was in the past. Certainly there is a lot more work published under his name, but much of that work does not represent his personal talent or ability and can be completed by secretarial support staff.

For example all the factual information relating to each and every one of the 2001 wineries listed in the book; address, phone number, winemaker production etc, could be gathered by support staff. Even most of the summaries, especially where it relates to wineries that have not been rated, and contains mainly information about family background, and varietals produced, could be obtained and compiled by his staff. As an aside, I noticed in a number of entries, even big wineries, where information was at least eighteen months out of date. This is especially noticeable in regard to winemakers’ names.

So the first big question is, “how much of the work is actually Halliday's?” Even the first 50 pages of the book, which contains piles of useful information is of a statistical nature and it could best be described as a summary of other information contained in the rest of the book. Well over half of it could have been written and compiled by his staff. Is this a criticism? No, merely a conclusion which will enable readers to understand that Halliday is not spending all of his time ringing up wineries to gain basic information.

The area where the work is uniquely Halliday's is clearly based around his wine tasting. Just to recap, he rated 5957 wines and provided tasting notes for 4414 of them. Obviously, this information was also used to rate/re-rate the wineries too.

We all know that Halliday is an incredibly skilled and fast taster, but assuming he did nothing else but taste wine for this book working on a 47 week working year, he would have to taste 25 wines per day for this book. That may not sound like much for a professional taster, but the reality is that Halliday does far more than just produce this book and the chances are he was assessing more like 200 wines per day for it. If that was the case, he would be spending less than 2 1/2 minutes on each wine, and that includes the time taken to either write or dictate each tasting note. If this sounds like a large number, that's par for the course for the average wine show judge.

In reality, according to comments in the book, Halliday states “There were two periods of intense tasting activity in the twelve months during which the tasting notes for this addition were made…” which tends to support my basic premise that each wine was only examined very briefly. Even at 200 wines a day, (or less than 2 1/2 minutes per wine,) it would have taken four solid working weeks to taste through all those wines.

This then begs the next question, “how accurate and useful are the tasting notes,” given the incredibly short amount of time devoted to each one. This will be answered later when it can be put into a broader perspective.

Halliday is a great believer in ratings, especially numerical ones. He rates wines using his hundred point system, vintages using a ten points system, and wineries using a five-star system. It is the use of these rating systems, which in many ways are one of the biggest weaknesses in his work.

Firstly, let us examine his “Vintage Rating System” which according to Halliday “is a mark out of ten for quality.” The inclusion of the vintage chart for each region and sub region, is certainly a useful piece of work and can be an invaluable guide for wine buyers. The lowest mark given is four, which has been awarded on only seven occasions, whilst a perfect ten has been awarded on twenty one occasions. One can only wonder why you have a ten point rating system and only use seven of the numbers. In reality, it is a seven point rating system, not a 10 point system; but this is not the only numerical dichotomy in Halliday's repertoire, as you will see for yourself later. Readers may think that Halliday is saving the lower numbers for a complete disaster of a vintage but why could anyone need that much distinction at the low end; surely it is more important to have more room at the top and use the whole scale.

The next segment deals with “Best of the best of Australian wine 2006.” Naturally, this section will be highly desired by the points’ chasers who are after the highest pointed wine in each varietal category, but that is not Halliday’s problem. In a smart move, Halliday has placed the region of origin of each wine and the results are telling. In the case of Pinot for example, the majority of the highest point wines come from the Mornington Peninsula; Riesling from Clare and Tasmania, whilst the Shiraz section is dominated by the Barossa.

That is followed by a “Special Value Section” which will appeal to the masses, as the segments are broken up into the below $10 bracket and the $10-15 bracket. Interestingly enough, the only red under $10 that scores above 87 is the 2002 Yellow Tail Cabernet that comes in at 92 points. In the Red $10-15 bracket, most of the wines are from 2003 and all are rated either 90 or 91 points with one exception, the 2003 Hardy Oomoo McLaren vale Shiraz which rates 92 points.

A list of “Ten of the best new wineries” comes next; the wineries that have made this list will be doing cart-wheels, and those who are chasing "the next big thing" now have a new focus.

Then comes a list of the “Best Wineries of the Region” but in order to understand this list, it is critical to understand how they are rated. According to Halliday, wineries are rated out of five stars. The rating goes like this:-

Outstanding winery capable of producing wines of the highest calibre.

Excellent producer of very high quality wines.

Very good producer of wines with class and character.

A solid, usually reliable, maker of good to very good wines.

A typical good winery, but may have some lesser wines.

Adequate; usually aspires to improve.

N/R Normally ascribed where I have not tasted any current release wines.

Halliday goes on to state, “I have subtly tweaked the application of the star rating system this year, deliberately focusing more on the best wines from the producer than on the least.” Halliday then proceeds to quote percentages of wineries that have fallen into each category.

He also goes on to state “I am all too conscious of the importance each producer attaches to the rating given, I have made a particular effort this year to rationalise the ratings, with no less than four sweeps through the book to focus on this issue. Even then, the question arises whether past performance should be taken into account, and if so how much. Human nature being what it is, everyone is happy when their ratings rises, unhappy if it falls.”

Given this importance, and Halliday’s cognisance of it, it is interesting to examine the statistics Halliday gives us in more detail. According to him, 8% receive 5 stars which on the surface would seem reasonable. 4½ star wineries represent 16%, 4 and 3½ star wineries represent 35% and roughly 11% received three stars; with very few receiving 2 ½ stars. However, the statistics can be interpreted another way. Approximately 30% of wineries have not been reviewed, and not all of them would be substandard, some like Noon and Wild Duck Creek would probably earn five stars.

So if we ignore the wineries that have not been rated the percentages look very different.

5 Stars = 10% 4½ Star = 22% 4 and 3½ = 48% 3 Star = 13% 2½ Star = 7%

If the truth be known, the numbers are probably somewhere in between but there are two issues here. The first is what is the point of having a five-star system that starts at 2½ Stars?

There are seven divisions when there could quite feasibly be ten. Not using the entire scale is a waste, and a problem that pervades much of Halliday's (and some other writers) work. It then leads to the second issue.

The second issue is the skew of the ratings. Almost one third of the rated wineries rate either 4½ or 5 stars, yet only about 20% would qualify as “a typical good winery, but may have some lesser wines” or lower (3 stars or less). Is this realistic? This is symptomatic of the second major problems with Halliday's work and it will be examined in more detail later when more examples have been provided.

Like wine ratings, where people think that some wines should rate higher, and some should rate lower, the Winery ratings will obviously garner many of the same comments, but here it becomes even more complex and complicated. For example, Wolf Blass who produce an enormous range of wines scored five stars and Schubert Estate (happily for them) also received five stars but they produce exactly one wine. So Schubert's assessment rests on the review of one wine only, whilst Wolf Blass’ assessment rests on the reviews of many wines, however according to the definition they are an "Outstanding winery capable of producing wines of the highest calibre” and whilst this may be true with the upper echelon of the wine that they produce, they also produce some fairly ordinary but acceptable wine too. Yet in judging the wineries rating, in this case, the low end wines are pretty much ignored; Jim Barry and Veritas, whose low end wines would be close to being on par with Wolf Blass's low-end wines, both only manage to score four stars which leads one to ask “are they that much of a lesser winery then Wolf Blass?”

Whilst it is an extremely difficult and vexing problem with no easy answer for Halliday, by starting the ratings at 2½ Stars and having approximately one third of the rated wineries 4½ Stars or higher, it doesn't help the issue; in fact, it may be part of the problem.

When having a look at the “Best Wineries of the Region” section, it is worthwhile remembering that in reality, like any list, this is one person's opinion and not the word “from upon high.” There are no mystical connotations, no right and no wrong; this is a purely subjective assessment that has been made by one wine writer, no more and no less. Just because a winery has made this list, does not mean that as a consumer, if you buy their wine you won't get a bad one, or one that you don't enjoy. However, it will certainly help the marketing effort for the wineries in this category.

The next section called “Ten dark horses” is a, to quote Halliday a “highly subjective list of wineries that have excelled themselves over the last 12 months.” Highly subjective sums it up perfectly.

That is followed by a section on a “Wine and food” and another one covering the “Cork versus screw cap” debate, the latter being covered reasonably even-handedly and without obvious bias.

When you move into the book proper, the body of the book certainly contains a huge amount of information, much of it extremely useful and obviously, if it contained everything that it could contain, it would cover a few volumes and could be the size of an encyclopaedia. However, in today's environment that may not necessarily be as stupid as it sounds as there is a very simple alternative; it's called a CD-ROM. Remember, going back to Halliday's earlier Companions, an optional CD-ROM containing all the information in the book as well as current and back tasting notes, was available. What a bloody good idea, and why isn't it available now? What a waste, especially when you consider the years of effort and fantastic knowledge that could be made available. If they are afraid sales would drop substantially due to illegal copying, (something that frankly I doubt) a subscription web site like Jeremy Oliver’s would be a viable alternative.

As good as the information in the book may be, it is what the book doesn't contain that is fascinating. Cullen Wines, arguably one of the finest producers of Cabernet Sauvignon in this country is rated as a five-star winery yet the only tasting note on their red wine is for the 2003 Ellen Bussell. Does that mean that the Diana Madeline wasn't worthy of inclusion, or wasn't it tasted, the reader has no idea. It is possibly easy for readers to understand why a cult winery like Mount Mary would receive a five-star rating although there are no tasting notes on their wines, but why a winery like Best’s receives five stars and has no wines reviewed is inexplicable to the average reader.

When almost 5957 wines have been rated for the book and only (sic) 4414 of them have been included, it certainly gives the reader plenty to think about.

The final segment, prior to getting into main body of the book covers the technicalities of “How to use the companion” and I have intentionally left this segment till last. In the subsection on how tasting notes are scored, Halliday states, "I also freely acknowledge that the 100-point scale is effectively a 20-point scale with 0.1 increments if viewed as being out of 20. In international usage the same holds true.”

This statement is a revelation and in direct contradiction to what I had previously believed. Basically, if I understand this correctly, which I'm not sure that I do, Halliday is stating that if a wine scores 18.5 (in the show ring out of 20 which qualifies it for a gold medal) and you multiply by five you get 92 points. According to Oliver, 94 would be required to obtain a gold medal so it is not a straight linear projection and when Oliver converted to the 100 point system he freely admitted it was not as easy as multiplying by 5. So when experts can't easily agree, what hope does Joe public have of really understanding what these scores actually mean?

One thing is for sure, the higher the score the more impressive it sounds, and wineries just love those high scores.

At the bottom end of the spectrum, Halliday rates wines from 75 to 79 stating they are “Usually wines with some deficiency, technical or otherwise.” At the top end, wines from 94 and above are “Outstanding wines of the highest quality, usually with a distinguished pedigree.” It is interesting to note that only three table wines and seven fortified wines score 97 points and that nothing is rated above 97 points. In reality, you have a 100-point system using points ranging from 75 to 97, giving a spread of 22 points.

Does this make rational sense?

As a subjective observation, it looks to me as though over the years, the points awarded by Halliday seem to be increasing and this is not good for a number of reasons. As the system is effectively only using 22 points on the scale, things seem to be getting crowded at the top end. The more crowded they become, the less meaning and integrity the score holds and the more critical the tasting notes become. As the book gets bigger, the time to assess each wine gets smaller and the information contained in the tasting note shrinks. Add to that the fact that wine industry will push any medal, high score or award and they can find for all it's worth, no matter how meaningless it is, (and many retailers even manufacture their own ludicrous scores) and you have what can only be described as “a lazy approach” to flogging wine.

It's no longer the case of, “you may like my wine because it’s characteristics are ……;” it's now a case of buy my wine because Fred Bloggs awarded it 96 points, it won a gold medal (for the prettiest label) at The Bullamakanka Art Show, or I the retailer, awarded it 98 points (on my scale that starts at 90.)

So what has this got to do with Halliday and The Wine Companion you may well ask?

Unfortunately the overuse and compulsive, indeed addictive reliance on the hundred point system, “best of lists” and wine show medal results, has become the primary driving marketing force in the wine industry today. Wine writers are like the birds that ride around on the back of cows picking off bugs and insects; they fulfil a useful function and generally try and keep the host clean, but are reliant on the host to put food in their mouth. Without (the industry) the cows, the birds (or writers) would be unemployed. Each part of the partnership relies on the other to do their part in symbiotic relationship.

How is it that wine writers like Huon Hooke and can publish reviews and tasting notes in major newspapers without attaching the score and be completely credible? You be the judge!

As much as I genuinely respect James Halliday's ability, and his work is both prolific and pretty remarkable, the way this work is currently presented is exacerbating a problem and not showing the man's true ability. A clear case of quantity, which is still extremely useful; but there is no substitute for quality. But then what you want for $29.95?