Wine Criticism Quotes

I only really fake it anymore with sommeliers who are being really snotty to me and I don't want to take their grief and so I try to do something to kind of throw them off or put them on the defensive, even if I don't know what I'm talking about.

If it's red, French, costs too much, and tastes like the water that's left in the vase after the flowers have died and rotted, it's probably Burgundy.

Mind you, it’s all bullshit with wine, isn’t it? It’s just f**king vinegar with a fizz, no matter what the tasters say.

I'll tell you what I love. Sending back bottles of wine that aren't right in restaurants in France! Whoa! I love the French, but I do find their wine snobbery something unbearable.

Essentially, wines are fermented grape juice, so I'm trying to make the point that the wine world is about scores and marketing and kind of creating a scarce resource where they don't really exist.

From a wine critic's perspective, there are far too many innocuous, over-oaked, over-acidified, or over-cropped wines emerging from California. While those sins would not be a problem if the wines sold for under $20, many are in fact $75-$150. That's appalling.

Critics have done the wine industry a lot of good overall.

Riesling? It smells like an intensive care ward.

The wine world is so big. Yes, there are styles of wines I don't like. Orange wine, natural wines and low-alcohol wines. Truth is on my side, and history will prove I am right.

Last week, I had to offer my publisher a bottle that was far too good for him simply because there was nothing between the insulting and the superlative.

Wine is similar to music in that it's a purely experiential realm, and it's a purely subjective practice. That's sort of the funny thing about wine criticism or, for that matter, music criticism. At times, those are useful guides, but ultimately it's all about how you react to that music or wine.

The first confrontation I had with an Aussie wine was a well-known Cabernet/Shiraz and it reminded me of boiled sweets. I find a lot of Australian wines unsubtle.

When I began visiting Bordeaux in 1979, only a handful of writers were there to taste the wines in the spring (and nearly all were British).

Wine is something to enjoy. We get sick and tired of people who pick it apart and talk about its 'saucy nuances.'

It's nearly impossible to believe just how provincial the wine world was in 1978, the year I launched my journal, 'The Wine Advocate.' There were no wines exported from New Zealand and virtually none from Australia (including Penfolds Grange, one of the greatest wines in existence).

Don't let anyone tell you what you ought to like... Some wines that some experts think are absolutely exquisite don't appeal to me at all.

I'm not afraid to call a wine that tastes like Skittles or green peppers mixed with orange marmalade. I'll say, 'It tastes like chicken.' I mean, that's not what people think of when they think of wine, but that's what it tastes like to me and it hits home.

Wine writers have been around for almost as long as there has been wine, but in the past, generally speaking, most wine writing was uncritical and emphasized wine as a romantic, historic beverage. Criticism and comparative tastings were eschewed for fear of offending the trade, which most writers depended upon for survival.

English wine is nonsense. They are over-priced and not very good.

When I find someone I respect writing about an edgy, nervous wine that dithered in the glass, I cringe. When I hear someone I don't respect talking about an austere, unforgiving wine, I turn a bit austere and unforgiving myself. When I come across stuff like that and remember about the figs and bananas, I want to snigger uneasily. You can call a wine red, and dry, and strong, and pleasant. After that, watch out.

Researchers who examined the voting records of wine judges found that 90 percent of the time they give inconsistent ratings to a particular wine when they judge it on multiple occasions.

When somebody wants to write an article attacking a scoring system or the influence of wine writers, who's right in the cross hairs? It's not Steve Tanzer, it's not Marvin Shanken, it's me. These other people, it's not like they don't have some influence, and I'm more than happy to share it.

The premise of Nossiter in 'Mondovino' would have been a lot more accurate when I started writing about wine in 1978 than when the movie was made in 2003. When I started, I was enormously critical of California wines, and I thought the entire wine industry was on a real slippery slope.

I do really enjoy Jay McInerney's wine writing. He's a good writer. He brings his fiction-writing skillset. He's not afraid to put wine in kind of a racy context and speak very candidly about it.

In the wine world, crusaders would have wine consumers believe that the only wines of merit are something completely indefinable but which they call 'authentic' or 'natural.'