I buy these magazines very sporadically and often by weight, so this seemed like a winner. Copies of Decanter I digest slowly over some months occasionally longer, so I have yet to find if it is rubbish or not. But so much wine journalism is awful; the old argument was that the people who knew about wine couldn't write and the journalists who could write didn't know about wine. What I can say is that wine writing seems to be done in the same factory that turns out airline mags. Which is terrible when I compare it to Waugh or even Mcinerney. I would make an exception for Jancis, she's great.flash_uk wrote:I have read the wine awards thing. I thought it was rubbish. I haven't got it to hand to be able to recount examples of what was rubbish, but I recall being bemused by the scarcity of wines assessed in some (many?) categories. And when you read the part about how they undertake the award process, it broadly seems to be: some people apply in a category, we taste, we make awards. So it seems to me that this is not really an attempt to find and assess what might be the outstanding wines in a category, but a half hearted process which any self-promoting producer can probably take advantage of.LGTrotter wrote:...a copy of Decanter, plus wine awards bonus thing.
The point about self-promotion rather than quality is getting increasingly hard to ignore. And I suppose that wines wishing to be considered probably have to pay some nominal administration fee (read heavy irony here please).
But I was cheered to see Richard Mayson as the fortified judge, then rolled my eyes at the winner, a £210 1988 Bual, quite astonishingly over priced.
This probably needs a thread entitled 'wine journalism', thank you for uncovering this rich seam of unmined moaning. At least it's not cricket.