It was entirely predictable that Michelin’s new venture into wine would trigger huffy French recriminations. Its Wine Selection Burgundy 2026, launched this month, awarded nine producers the top accolade of three grapes, another 20 vignerons two grapes, and 33 one grape. A further 32 were merely “selected”. Mais putain! They only gave Domaine Arnoux-Lachaux one grape? The celebrated Vosne-Romanée house publicly demanded its removal from the guide. But the row says something more fundamental about the demise of what has been one of the vinous world’s key organising systems: the wine guide.
Michelin’s new guide had attracted criticism before publication. When first announced last December, the publisher said its selections would “spotlight wine estates and producers across different regions of the world” – but it’s not clear when they’ll get around to rating anywhere outside France. Ribera del Duero? I wouldn’t bother keeping dates free, compañeros. Martinborough? Mais c’est où, ça?
Their method has been criticised too: it rates producers rather than wines, based on estates’ vineyard management, consistency and so on. Whatever the fairness of this, it doesn’t seem like a very useful product for consumers, at least compared to the obvious French competitor, the Guide Hachette des Vins, now in its forty-second edition and generally regarded as the bible of the French wine industry. Hachette rates individual cuvées from one to five, plus “coup de coeur” judges’ favourites.
It’s not clear how Michelin worked: Arnoux-Lachaux say they weren’t visited and that they stopped submitting wines for reviews years ago. The suspicion is that Michelin involved the Wine Advocate: it purchased a 40% share in Parker’s publication in 2017, acquiring it entirely in 2019. Trying to sweat that asset to expand the Michelin empire beyond restaurants and hotels could make sense. Might William Kelley, WA’s Editor-in-Chief and Burgundy specialist, have had a hand? He raved about Domaine Jean-Marc & Thomas Bouley‘s 2023 Pommard 1er Cru Les Rugiens Hauts – rated 100 points – months before the not-very-grand Volnay producer won “three grapes”. Michelin responded to this suggestion by saying simply that their judging team “brings together seasoned wine specialists and newly recruited inspectors… They are all seasoned professionals in the sector – former sommeliers, specialised critics or production experts.”
These might look to many drinkers like arcane squabbles in the rarified world of fine wine. But the real significance of Michelin’s wine venture is that it definitively marks the end of the consumer wine guide as we know it.
Mapping the best wines for buyers began with Cyrus Redding’s A History and Description of Modern Wines (1833). One might argue that Bordeaux’s 1855 classification did something similar – though the intended audience was still largely merchants and professionals. Wine advice for ordinary drinkers emerged later and more gradually from food, etiquette and travel writing.
Consumer-oriented wine publications as we’d understand them today first appeared only in the 1970s. The mid-late decade brought both Decanter and Wine Spectator magazines, as well as Hugh Johnson’s Pocket Wine Book (1977) and Parker’s Wine Advocate. The first recommendation-based handbooks arrived in 1980: Jancis Robinson’s Which? Wine Guide 1981 and John Platter’s first South African Wine Guide. France’s Guide Hachette des Vins and James Halliday’s Australian Wine Companion came out soon after, followed elsewhere, for instance, by José Peñin’s eponymous Spanish wine bible (1990).
There was always a problem, however, with print guides to wines on sale, especially if they specified particular shops: the books were out of date before they hit the shelves. This gap was made most obvious by the genre’s apotheosis, Malcolm Gluck’s Superplonk, first appearing in 1991 on the back of his Guardian column of the same name. But from the mid-1990s, consumers were getting access to a far more up-to-the-minute source of information – the internet. Gluck’s printed guide died an unlamented death in 2006.
Meanwhile the vast expansion of the wine world in the four or five decades since the advent of consumer guides means that, at least in places like the UK that import from everywhere, there’s far too much variety for any single guide to cover everything. Technological change may tame this field but it raises different dilemmas. The next iteration of the wine guide will, it seems, be powered by AI: even now, we face a growing tide of (mostly pseudo-) AI-driven apps telling people what to buy. But as with the internet’s impact on every other facet of criticism, it raises the urgent question: whose advice is this? Whose opinion? Can we trust it? AI wine apps are only as good as what people put into them.
Which brings us back to the value of guides written by human authors, whether anonymous or not. Many country-specific guides like Platter and Peñin retain their authority today, and have the virtue too of availability online as websites (and as an app, for Platter) to stay up to date. Most of Tim Atkin MW’s online reports have a narrower focus (regions or single countries) but greater depth. But while such guides are vital for wine professionals, and have cachet with producers, it’s questionable how many consumers rely on them, even the electronic versions. (Plenty do! Ed.)
This is the wine media world into which Michelin has launched itself. Inclusion in its selections probably confers some cachet, as the reactions to poor ratings suggest. But I can’t see many drinkers using it – not least because few of the Burgundian producers named welcome non-trade guests, let alone stooping to anything as déclassé as wine tourism.
And the Gallic focus? As with restaurants, it would be naïve to expect much from Michelin beyond French chauvinism and thinly-veiled snobbery. If the wine selections do ever venture outside l‘Hexagone, expect something as confused and tokenistic as the star awarded to Mexico City taco stand El Califa de León (though I can confirm their $2.50 tacos are superlative.) As for that wine guide that you pull out in a shop: RIP – it was fun while it lasted. But I’m not hailing the wine app as the future just yet.
Photo by Nick Fewings on Unsplash; Andy Neather blogs at https://aviewfrommytable.substack.com/