Much has been made, in both mention and meme, of the recently announced MICHELIN distinction for wine. Not to be confused with the MICHELIN Sommelier Award, or the recognition of good wine lists in the original MICHELIN star ratings, from 2026, the guide that has “orientated wine-lovers towards the finest tables in more than 70 destinations and to the world’s most elegant hotels”, as International Director Gwendal Poullennec puts it, will begin to inspect and reward wine estates and producers on “overall excellence.” I don’t know about you, but I hadn’t realised wine producers weren’t striving to excel.
We know MICHELIN’s main source of revenue is not selling guidebooks, but through partnerships with regions and governments keen to promote certain destinations as brands and hotels as trophies; the recent arrival of the guide in Jeddah is hardly incidental. An additional, and rather awkward, detail is that the group also owns Robert Parker’s Wine Advocate, with its reported two-million strong readership. Love it or loathe it, it has been the OG “vinfluencer” on consumers for decades with its focus on the hard and technical elements of wine drinking, even if it has begun to fall out of favour with some segments of the market. This may be MICHELIN’s way of addressing the consumer shift and interest in the softer elements of wine, the story side of winemaking, the repositioning of some wineries as travel destinations, chasing post-pandemic explosion of demand for “experiences over stuff” as we are constantly reminded by the editors of lifestyle glossies and digital marketing slogans. In any case, one cannot help feeling this is using a sabre on a screwcap.
Cast in the canonical, “the MICHELIN Grape” award proof-of-concept will commence with the Judgment of Bordeaux and Burgundy, where a team of “wine inspectors,” “production experts”, “former sommeliers” and “specialised critics” will visit wineries and rate them on five criteria:
Agronomy: examining clean farming practices but stopping short of requiring organic or regenerative standards (because there are already ratings for this of course); the “vitality of the soil” will be a key measure but without being measured with, say, soil samples and lab tests like Demeter does. The earthworms are safe.
Technical mastery: wines inspected must be “without any distracting flaws”, that means no quirky twist of fate that can throw a particular vintage a googly; regiment and order is the way.
Identity: wines should capture and express “the personality, sense of place and culture behind them” (as opposed to aspiring to being generic or grey matter?)
Balance: alcohol, acid, tannin and oak in proportion.
Consistency: assessments will cover a range of vintages.
We can all think of several wineries and producers we know and hold dear for which these criteria are not just add-ons or nice-to-haves, but are business-critical and essential to the winemaking philosophy and vocation. These producers perhaps just haven’t had the time or capacity or interest to broadcast what we all implicitly know about making good wine; they just get on with it, when they make, drink, think or dream about wine. Their “grape” award is not in the form of a pictogram.
Scepticism about this new award is not a rejection of standards and ratings per se: this new system was presumably concocted for consumers and generalists, not professionals. All wine lovers need benchmarks to build consensus and safeguard the know-how of countless hours, hands and hearts shaping viticulture across time and regions. The real concern is with yet more performative “content” in what has become an industry of ratings systems and guides to allow lifestyle tourists loose on their own Grand Tour across fragile wine regions collecting trophies.
Gustave Flaubert compiled his Dictionary of Received Ideas(1850-80), a satirical catalogue of clichés and ready-made opinions, exposing how people recycle fashionable babble instead of thinking for themselves. There is a whiff of Flaubert’s register here (incidentally his prescient entry for wine was: “Vins: Sujet de conversation entre hommes. Le meilleur est le Bordeaux, puisque les médecins l’ordonnent. Plus il est mauvais, plus il est naturel.”). (“Wine: a subject of conversation between men. Bordeaux is the best, as it’s prescribed by doctors. The worse it is, the more natural it is.”) Except wine is now packaged as “access,” “demystifying” or whatever passes for expertise at Instagram-caption depth, endorsed by lifestyle PR editors.
That rhetoric of openness often hardens into a new form of gatekeeping and elitism against technical knowledge of wine. Those who have seen how demanding viticulture is from the producer’s perspective might reasonably fear that this style of recognition will incentivise some of the worst generalist-consumer behaviours: a thirst for “experience” once again becomes foamy and formulaic, expressed in anodyne, unexamined words.
This “new chapter in the world of wine”, as MICHELIN’s director puts it, will of course be lucrative for their awarding body, which must extend its brand to compete with other “Next Gen” lists such as World’s 50 Best Vineyards, and to keep pace aspirational consumers. How thin is the line is between recognising and celebrating excellence in viticulture and turning it into an inverse snobbery of a not bothered-but-bothered in-crowd or mindless consumerism ready for inclusion in a Palme d’Or black comedy plot à la Triangle of Sadness?
Wine ratings and recommendation platforms are already fragmented, tribal and niche, from Jancis Robinson’s resources to Wine Spectator or Decanter (and indeed this site). That is a strength and charm and testament to individuals who want to learn more about wine and quietly do the uncool and unglamourous work. MICHELIN reports over nine million unique digital visitors to its ratings pages per month. The temptation will be to see it as “the world of wine” or another experiences or lifestyle fiefdom, like the “art world” or the “entertainment world”.
Wine is not a “world”, it is just the world. It is farming and labour and tragic weather; it is politics and policy competition; it is employment opportunity and gamble; it cannot be reduced to just being a weekend away or a bottle namedrop. Viticulture is not just for Tiktok, it’s for life, and probably not even our life, certainly not the content “creator’s” attention span.
Perhaps, if there is hope here, it lies in insisting that any new guides and awards should concretely contextualise the consequences of consumer choice. The same lifestyle and luxury followers of these recognition lists and guides may have to realise that taking that trip to Tinos to try “local wine” has implications for what they are “obsessed” with and the “vibes” when they stay in infinity pool hotels on such islands which do not have water to cultivate crops. They impact the ecosystem too (and can’t quibble about paying a fair price for wines).
The bubble will burst and hopefully it will be all the guides and “best” lists that will disappear or at least shuffle off to distort some other sector or output of patient human endeavour. Wine, as we know, is too eternal to be a fad and will outlast any fashion or even paradigm shift in behaviour as it has through history. It’s just a bit annoying that those of us in it for the long run, still must endure scrolling, reading, hearing insipid use of words like “vibe” and “curated” for a few more vintages.
Photograph by Marjan Blan on Unsplash.