Michelin to Introduce a Guide to Wineries

In 1900 Édouard and André Michelin first published their eponymous guide to boost the sales of their tyres. It started life with road maps, petrol stations and hotels, the reasoning being it would encourage people to drive more. Before long they added restaurants in what was to be seminal move, the popularity eventually making it the definitive and most influential culinary guide in the world. 125 years later the company has announced it will be expanding its guide to wineries. In a time when the wine sales are in decline can it be as influential or will it be drowned out in wine’s well established critical mass?

The new guide will evaluate estates on several criteria and will be judged by various experts described as ‘former sommeliers, seasoned critics and production experts”.  Like restaurants there will be three main awards, but instead of stars producers will get ‘grapes’. These are the definitions of them from the Michelin website:

Immediately I read this sentence with a degree of…consternation, alarm? “Whatever the vintage, wine lovers can turn to the estate’s creations with complete confidence”. It reminds of meeting Marc Perrin and his assertion that there is no such thing as bad vintages, just different expressions of the winemaker’s art, a belief clearly Michelin shares. I met it with raised eyebrows then, and I find them heading northwards now.  

Growing seasons are never consistent, and even for producers with the resources and expertise to deal with whatever Mother Nature can throw at them during one, from unseasonal frost, hail storms, heatwaves, drought and rot, their wines can be stylistically extremely diverse from one year to the next. Alcohol levels, tannins, fruit characteristics, acidity levels, texture all will have huge variations across vintages. Those extreme weather patterns can be extremely capricious and localised: one vineyard may lose its canopy to hail, while its neighbour is untouched. There are no guarantees when you are growing a crop, and I posit few winemakers would say their wine is worthy of three Michelin Grapes every year, without fail whatever the conditions.

Then you have to get into specifics: how far back are we talking? Ten years, twenty years, thirty or more? Owners change, winemakers retire, fortunes of estates ebb and flow. It is for this reason we have vintage charts, and tasting notes from critics going back decades, as well as sites like cellar tracker. To say you can buy any year ‘with complete confidence’ for me is inherently problematic.