Lecturer, Faculty of Business and Law, School of Business, University of Wollongong, University of Wollongong

Paul Chad does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

University of Wollongong provides funding as a member of The Conversation AU.

View all partners

Wine is the most popular alcoholic beverage in Australia. The country boasts over 2,100 local wineries, in addition to a substantial variety of imported wines. Given the extensive range available and the vast price spectrum – from under $5 to over $1,000 – even seasoned wine lovers can find selecting the right bottle a challenge.

Does a $1,000 wine necessarily provide 200 times the pleasure of a $5 bottle? The enjoyment of wine is profoundly personal and subjective. However, without the chance to try before buying, one must rely on other indicators of quality.

When purchasing wine, consumers often consider factors such as the brand’s reputation, critiques, ratings (including suggestions from friends), flavor preferences like grape type and sweetness, the occasion for drinking, price, and the attractiveness of the label, packaging, or product name.

Moreover, wineries and alcohol retailers frequently engage in marketing their products by showcasing high ratings from wine reviews and competition results. But the real question remains, how beneficial are these ratings and accolades?

First, what qualifies someone to be a wine reviewer? Although there are no specific qualifications, reviewers will typically have extensive training and experience in wine appreciation and/or winemaking.

Importantly, wine is generally rated based on its quality relative to other wines of the same grape variety and growing region. This means it is problematic to directly compare ratings across different wine varieties and regions.

Robert Parker, one of the world’s top wine critics, developed a 100-point rating system for wine. While variants exist, the 100-point scale typically starts at 50, with points awarded for colour (5 points max), aroma/bouquet (15 points), flavour/finish (20 points) and overall quality (10 points).

In Australia, James Halliday is a legend of the wine industry and founder of the Halliday Wine Companion, which provides tasting notes, ratings based on Halliday’s own version of the 100-point system, winery ratings and annual awards.

Renowned critics such as Huon Hooke and Bob Campbell, who is one of the few with the esteemed Master of Wine title, contribute to The Real Review. This platform provides wine critiques, scores, an annual “top wineries” list, and a “wine classification” scheme for wines from Australia and New Zealand. More on Bob Campbell and The Real Review.

While submitting wines for evaluation at Wine Companion and The Real Review is free for wineries, the control of these reviews remains with the respective platforms. If wineries wish to use the reviews for promotional purposes, they must obtain a membership from Wine Companion or The Real Review.

In addition, Wine Pilot, initiated by Angus Hughson in Australia, levies a $70 fee plus GST for each review, which the winery can then employ freely for marketing. Concurrently, Wine Orbit, under Sam Kim in New Zealand, reviews each bottle of Australian wine for $30, and the reviewed wineries may use these assessments in their marketing without further charge. Details on Wine Pilot’s fees and Wine Orbit’s charges.

Opinions diverge on whether upfront charges for wine reviews are justified, comparing this approach to the model of offering free reviews and then requiring annual memberships for marketing use. Diverse perspectives on wine review payments.

This is a question readers will need to judge for themselves.

There are many discussions about the objectivity of reviewers and their potential financial incentives to provide favorable reviews. If a reviewer consistently rates a winery poorly, it’s possible that said winery might cease to seek their services, impacting the reviewer’s earnings. However, the reviewer’s personal integrity is also at stake.

The Conversation spoke with Sam Kim, who explained that his $30 flat fee assists in the operation of his small business, adding that offering his services for free was not sustainable.

When questioned about his unbiasedness, he remarked, “I would like to say ‘no’, but it’s not up to me to judge. Consumers will ultimately decide that. And given I have been around a while, perhaps I’m doing okay much of the time.”

Angus Hughson of Wine Pilot noted that “various factors could sway opinions of wine reviewers,” including personal relationships with vintners fostered by their profession.

He mentioned that the essence of wine review relies on personal integrity, emphasizing that reviewers who exaggerate their scores for more visibility or recognition might harm their reputation, ultimately “diminishing their impact over time.”

Jacinta Hardie-Grant, Managing Director at Halliday, asserted that the platforms’s subscription-based marketing approach does not affect the neutrality of reviews. She clarified that the reviewers are unaware of whether a winery submitting samples for review holds a subscription.

The Real Review was not available for comment before the deadline.

Let’s now consider wine shows and awards. There are some prestigious wine shows such as the London-based Decanter Awards, as well as various smaller shows.

Show operators typically charge wineries to enter their wines, so you really do “have to be in it to win it”. Some wineries choose not to enter, while others are renowned for repeat entries.

But there is a potential problem with the wine show process. Ideally, a rigid, scientific method would be used to determine the winners – but this is not always possible, or indeed practical.

Wine is judged “blind”, whereby judges are unaware of the brand. This is a positive. However, the judges will typically judge numerous wines, so the order of judging can affect the results, which is a negative.

Wine show results and awards also often compare across wine varieties and regions, or have a “Winery of the Year” award. These results and awards have their own sets of judging criteria and are often viewed with a level of scepticism.

Consumers should remember these results and awards, while they do have some science behind them, are subjective.

Wine reviewers regularly release results of their wine review activities. My inbox subsequently gets bombarded by wineries promoting their winning wines, referring to reviews and award results.

But these reviews and results remain subjective. Just because one person likes a wine, that doesn’t mean someone else (you) will definitely like it!

It’s always wise to sample before making a purchase. To do this, consider attending wine tastings at local shops, visiting wineries for cellar-door experiences, or ordering a glass of wine at various restaurants.

When you decide to purchase a bottle, referring to reviews or awards can still be helpful, but remember to stay within your budget.

On July 31, 1395, the Duke of Burgundy declared a war of annihilation on an “evil and disloyal” enemy and invader: a purple, acidic grape known as “Gamay.”

According to the ordinance issued by Philip the Bold, Gamay not only threatened the livelihoods of honest vignerons who used higher-quality grapes, but also ruined Burgundy’s reputation for fine Pinot Noir wines with its bitter taste and apparently harmful effects on public health. In order to safeguard the esteemed Pinot Noir and the well-being of Philip’s people, the ordinance declared, all Gamay vines were to be cut down within a month and completely uprooted by the following Easter: “ripped out, eradicated, destroyed, reduced to nought … forever.”

If the language of the edict seemed needlessly vindictive, perhaps it was because this war was personal to Philip, a keen economic steward who had worked assiduously to develop Burgundian wine production. As a younger son to King John II of France, Philip had received Burgundy as a compensation prize while his elder brother Charles V succeeded to the throne. With royal authority now disintegrating under the latter’s mentally unstable son Charles VI, the ambitious Philip sought not only to rule his appanage as an effectively independent duke, but also to outshine all other fiefdoms in power, riches, and magnificence.

In this competition, Philip understood that wine, with the trade revenue and prestige it brought to him and his duchy, was a most valuable currency.

In the Late Middle Ages, Burgundian Pinot Noir was rapidly establishing itself as a superior variety of wine, yet it faced considerable threats from both natural disasters and human actions. The Hundred Years’ War brought English soldiers who wreaked havoc in the region, and not long afterward, the Black Death hit Burgundy hard in 1348 and even harder in 1360.

The path to recovery was sluggish, and during the 1390s, Philip the Bold became alarmed by a new challenge. The Gamay grape, originating from a small village near Beaune, started to proliferate in Burgundian vineyards. It was productive, yielding about triple the wine per acre and maturing two weeks earlier than the Pinot grape.

Although high yields were not inherently a problem, the abundance of what was considered an inferior grape compared to Pinot was troubling to the duke. He was concerned that the Gamay vines would dominate the land, displacing the more esteemed Pinot or other more valuable crops. Philip lamented that vineyards best suited for high-quality wine were being neglected for the sake of maximizing output of lesser wines. He criticized the use of organic fertilizer on vines for imparting undesirable flavors and accused some vendors of diluting Gamay wine with hot water to mask its bitterness, which would later revert, rendering the wine “quite foul.”

Philip described this inferior wine as harmful to human health, a claim based not on his own experience but on hearsay—believing that its bitterness was indicative of broader dangers. In contrast, he praised the Pinot Noir as being highly beneficial for health. This negative view toward Gamay led to a decrease in the overall prestige of Burgundian wines, as it began to be identified not by the renowned Pinot variant but by the ubiquitous Gamay vine. This shift deeply troubled Philip, leading him to vocalize significant concern for his land and people, emphasizing the urgent need for intervention to preserve the reputation and quality of Burgundian wine.

That remedy was an order for the destruction of all Gamay vines within a month. Because Philip issued the ordinance at the end of July, vignerons would have to cut down their own harvest just as the grapes were beginning to ripen. Most poorer vignerons, more concerned about feeding and sheltering their families than the lofty ambitions and tastes of a royal prince, appreciated the Gamay for its easy harvest and high yield, which offered a reprieve that the temperamental and needy Pinot could not provide.

While Philip threatened a heavy fine for infractions, the prospect of losing much of their 1395 vintage would ruin Gamay growers who could not have foreseen the new orders. It’s probable that many of them, staying true to the healthy medieval tradition of popular resistance against unjust laws, disobeyed Philip’s ordinance, preferring to risk a fine than guarantee their own ruin.

Philip claimed in the ordinance to receive support from “many bourgeois [townspeople] and others of our good towns of Beaune, Dijon, and Chalon and their environs” who benefited from the influx of revenue and goods that came with selling good wine, but the actual reaction told an entirely different story. On August 9, 1395, the municipal council of Dijon, the largest city in the duchy proper (not counting the Flemish possessions of Philip’s wife), denounced the ordinance as a violation of their civic privileges and refused to publish or implement it. The duke responded by throwing the mayor in prison and appointing a governor to take control on the pretext of dealing with the alleged Gamay-and-water malpractice, possibly violating Dijon’s original charter that gave its own citizens responsibility for supervising the city’s economic life.

If the duke thought his heavy hand would stabilize Burgundy’s wine sector and move the region towards prosperity, he was wrong. The destruction of Gamay vines, which had emerged as a natural response to the already-declining productivity that Philip sought to reverse, plunged the region into a recession. Productivity fell ever more steeply, speculation in wine sales collapsed, and poverty gripped a population shorn of their precious trade. Few places were struck more severely than Beaune, the birthplace of Gamay, where records show a drop in the annual local wine monopoly bid from 65 livres in 1394 to just 27 livres in 1400.

Within that same time period, the proportion of financially solvent households in Beaune dropped from 41% to 13%. The Burgundian vineyards would eventually grow back after decades of re-cultivation, by which time commerce had fallen into the hands of foreign merchants and Burgundy had become a backwater in its own namesake polity (a modern label, of course) compared to the trade-enriched Low Countries, which Philip and his descendants acquired through strategic marriages.

Still, the ordinance may have accomplished some of Philip’s objectives. While the ordinance targeted Gamay, the political independence of cities like Dijon and Beaune also fell victim to its enforcement, a possibly intended effect for a ruler seeking to extend his authority. And by imposing prototypical measures designed to address quality control and shape economic output, Philip resembled the head of a modern administrative state using the powers at hand to sketch out the boundaries and character of what would eventually become the official Vin de Bourgogne regional appellation (AOC).

Scatterings of Gamay survived in reduced form, with many of its vines exiled to Beaujolais, an area south of the duchy. There, warmed by golden summers and nurtured by granite-flecked soil, the hated grape re-emerged in triumph, producing a cheerful, elegant variety of wine that, when released and consumed at a young age, shed the bitterness that so offended the ducal tongue. While Beaujolais red remained a cherished table wine for the locals over the next several centuries, its redeeming qualities eventually earned it worldwide popularity and a long-awaited appellation in 1936, followed by a 2011 re-classification as AOC Bourgogne Gamay under the broader Burgundian appellation.

Fortunately for Philip, he did not live to see his defeat at the hands of a grape.