When it comes to judging wine, context can often be everything

It’s a measure of how quickly the wine revolution is gathering pace in India that an international

wine competition hosted in Bombay last week got thousands of entries from all over the world. The competition was jointly organised by Sommelier magazine and the

Wine Society of India which is headed by Steven Spurrier, the well known British wine writer who organised the famous judgement of Paris wine tasting of Californian and French wines in 1976.

 

   The competition had 17 judges, many of them very knowledgeable about wine plus the odd faltu such as myself. We were divided into groups of three and asked to give individual ratings to each wine we tasted. Every table had a sort of chairman and he was supposed to guide the judging without actually influencing the individual judges.

 

   The way it worked was this. We would be given say, seven bottles of wine. We would be told what grape was used in the wine and offered the country of origin of each wine. We would also be told the price band for each wine though not the exact price. But we would not know the name of the wine.

 

   We were supposed to taste the first wine individually and to then discuss it with the rest of the table. Once we arrived at some kind of consensus, we would go on to taste the other wines silently without needless discussion. Then, we would mark them out of 20.

 

   This marking was done on a variation of the American pattern. In America, even when exams are marked out of 100, the minimum score is 50 which in American arithmetic is the same as zero. So we were told that a really bad wine that was undrinkable should get 11 out of 20. (Yes, I know. I thought it was bizarre too but this is how wines are marked all over the world.)

 

   Because it was impossible for anyone to taste over 2,000 wines in a single afternoon, the wines were divided between tables. To be fair, that allowed for a degree of diversity of opinion because even on a single table there was a wide variety of opinions. But as we shall see, when one of the judges is a stubborn jerk like myself, this could lead to some distortions.

 

   We began the competition – held at the Grand Central Hotel in Bombay – with Indian white wines. I thought they were nearly uniformly disgusting and said so. One or two were drinkable and merited say, 13 on 20 but nothing deserved much more than that. When we moved on to Indian Cabernet Sauvignons, the picture improved but not by very much.

 

   The other judges on my table were wine merchant Sanjay Menon and Rukn Luthra of Remy Cointreau. They were inclined to be slightly more generous than I was and Sanjay (who was the chairman of our table) kept asking us to look at the price band before giving out marks. A really cheap wine that tasted as good as a more expensive wine deserved higher marks, he said.

 

   As this was a blind tasting (all the bottles were covered in silver paper so that we could not see the labels) we had no idea what the wines were. Nor frankly, could any of us guess. In the case of one wine which was quite drinkable, Sanjay questioned whether it was an Indian wine at all. We gave it an okay rating but Sanjay ceremonially placed a question mark next to the points.

 

   Frequently, we disagreed. Because I am not a wine writer I did not have access to Sanjay’s vocabulary and so we made him write the tasting notes. Usually I watched with incredulity when he said things like “I’m getting red berries, traces of leather and a little tar.” I wanted to say “Hello, but surely there are some grapes in there as well?”

 

   But even Sanjay tired of looking for ‘hints of guava and just that edge of tropical fruit.’ Half way into the competition, both Rukn and I noticed that the adjective he used most frequently was ‘soapy.’ Often he used this to describe wines that we thought were okay. On the other hand, wines that I thought tasted like dishwashing liquid frequently pleased his discerning palate.

 

   But where we really disagreed was on the issue of overall rating. Our marks translated into four categories: commended, bronze, silver and gold. My view was that our ratings should be absolute. A gold wine should be a great claret or something that could be regarded as truly exceptional anywhere in the world. It made no sense to give a gold to the best red Bordeaux entered in competition when we all knew hundreds of clarets that were far superior even if they were not part of this competition.

 

   Other tables did not share this opinion and were much more generous with their marks. I thought this was wrong. Eventually, the wines will be described as ‘gold medal winners at the Sommelier Competition’ with no reference to context. Nobody will know what other wines we tried or care that they were the best of the wines that were entered in the competition. I believed that ratings had to be absolute to avoid misleading wine drinkers in the future.

 

"How would the wine have tasted if we had tried it along with other excellent wines? Isn’t there a danger of marking too highly only from mediocrity fatigue?"

   We had some disagreements at the end. Sanjay went a bundle on some mediocre Spanish wines and wanted to give them all golds. Either he was tired or he was just drunk. I held out. And eventually we called Steven Spurrier to adjudicate. Steven was far more generous than I had been but even he did not agree with Sanjay’s lavish exuberance. Eventually, Sanjay’s favourite got bronze and silver.

 

   Were there any astonishing revelations or moments of great discovery? I found a Hungarian wine that I like a lot which was a bit of a surprise but given that it cost upwards of Rs 15,000 a bottle I couldn’t really see anyone ordering it at a restaurant. For that price, people would want something better known – and would get it.

 

   Apart from that, there were hardly any surprises. I had gone into the competition hoping to declare that Indian wines were easily the equal of imported table wines. But the reality was that the Indian wines – judged at a blind tasting – were pretty mediocre at best. I’m sure we make some great wines in India but for some reason not one of them was given to us to taste.

 

   The following day, Sommelier magazine and the Wine Society organised a gala dinner at the Grand Central to which nearly everybody who is anybody in the Indian wine world was invited. I thought the dinner was fun but was taken aback by the large number of gold awards that were announced. I knew many of the wines that received these awards and I was pretty sure that very few of them would have got gold ratings if they had been judged at my table.

 

   So, were we being too mean with our marks? In the context of the competition, we clearly were not generous enough. And I think this worked to the disadvantage of those wines that were unlucky enough to get us as judges. So perhaps they were treated unfairly. And for that, I apologise to the wine makers.

 

   On the other hand, I still believe that ratings must be absolute. If Chateau Petrus is a platinum plus wine, then a gold must be only about two points or so lower than that. You can’t give gold awards to wines that are merely good rather than excellent only because they seem better than the competition.

 

   I was so pleased to find the Hungarian wine that I took it to another table and gave it to a sommelier who I respect for his knowledge of wine. “It’s very nice,” he said. “Gold?” I asked. “I don’t know,” he responded. “But compared to the Indian wines we’ve tasted today, this tastes like Chateau Petrus,” he said.

 

   Which was my point. How would the wine have tasted if we had tried it along with other excellent wines? Isn’t there a danger of marking too highly only from mediocrity fatigue?

 

   As much as I enjoyed the gala dinner, I left early when an interminable charity auction went on and on. My friends from the Four Seasons who also left the dinner early had brought along some Californian wines from their cellar. The Grand Central’s master chefs had arranged a magnificent dinner in one of their restaurants. So we were glad to escape the auction and eat with a collection of hoteliers from ITC and the Four Seasons.

 

   At the dinner, we drank the Californian wines. And then, I produced a ‘reserve’ Indian white wine that had not been entered in the competition but which the wine maker had kindly given me.

 

   The Indian wine paled so badly in comparison to the Californian that nobody drank it. Perhaps this was unfair. Perhaps the wine would have seemed much more impressive if we were comparing it to the best of the Nasik valley.

 

   But either way, it made my point for me. When it comes to judging wine, context can often be everything.