I had the chance to chat with John Szabo Tuesday after his seminar at the Wines of Chile event at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto. Canada’s first Master Sommelier (2004), Szabo is one of the faces of the prominent wine-ranking and information service WineAlign, and one of the most highly respected Canadian personalities in the worldwide wine industry.

What I’ve always liked about WineAlign is that the group scores hard. They’re sort of the anti-James Suckling of the wine world. And integrity is everything when it comes to wine ratings. Which is why the news that emerged last week about a new wine rating service from WineAlign made waves.

“In light of the LCBO’s recent restrictions on media access to new Vintages releases, WineAlign was approached by Drinks Ontario to create a service to help get wines reviewed in a professional, objective and timely manner. In response to this request, we are introducing a new service called Tastings,” the email to wineries and agents noted.

The new Tastings is essentially a pay-for-review service, promising that the wine you submit will receive a quick turnaround “with multiple reviews from LCBO-accredited wine writers.” The income for the service will go to cover various costs, including “receiving, storing, handling and removal of bottles and boxes, writer fees, adding wines to our database, admin, etc.,” the release indicates. Fees top out at $35 per bottle and scale downward for bulk shipments.

But does this new process now compromise the integrity of those reviews?

“It’s a big issue and an important one, Szabo says. “There have been cries of conflict of interest. But pure avoidance of conflict of interest disappeared long ago as soon as soon as publications—and this is pretty much every publication worldwide—started accepting advertising from the vinous industry and free samples and trips, even if they’re generically organized association trips. It’s a symbiotic relationship between reviewers and the wine industry, and it has to be. And I would actually say that if you are not accepting trips and lunches and taking the opportunity to meet winemakers, taking the time to travel to markets and visit them, you’re not really doing your job. For example, I’m doing an article on rosé. I have an opportunity to travel to Provence and taste 100 rosés and come up with, let’s say, my five recommended wines. Or, with my holier-than-thou independence, go to the LCBO and buy 10 rosés, because I can afford only 10, and I recommend five out of that. Which report would you rather read: the best 5% or the best 50%? So I think it’s absolutely essential that writers take every opportunity they can to learn and to gain context. Because everyone has an opinion. What separates the value of opinions is the context in which they are created.

COVERING COSTS

“WineAlign accepts advertising from within the industry, as pretty much everybody else does,” Szabo continues. “(But) an administrative fee to cover the genuine costs of processing wine is really a necessity at this point, because advertising revenue has dropped dramatically. And subscription revenue, as we know (has also dropped)—people don’t want to pay for information anymore. And if you’re an independent publication, as WineAlign is, and not supported by a large conglomerate with a lot of other revenue streams and other operations to offset the losses caused by the wine division, then you have to find a way of making up the shortfall. But I don’t see how in any way it poses any conflict—it certainly doesn’t affect my opinion and the content of my review in any way. It amounts to nothing in practical terms for me financially. If it allows the office to operate, and me therefore to operate within that office and make a living, well then, I’m 100% supportive of that.

“The other point of contention brought up was that we opened it up for suppliers of these wines to delete their reviews,” Szabo notes. “That I have to chuckle about, because WineAlign is the only company I know of, other than maybe Michael Vaughan (Vintage Assessments), that publishes negative or not-so-good reviews. Virtually every single other publication publishes only glowing, positive reviews. So essentially, they’ve done the deleting already that we are offering companies who supply the wines to do themselves. We’re actually just downloading the responsibility of deleting to them. But we will still publish that review until they ask that we take it down. And, to be honest, I hope they do, because I don’t want our website to be populated with wines we don’t want to direct consumers to. Our mission is to connect consumers with good wines; not with what not to drink.”

It’s important to note here that it’s not just the low scores of a particular wine that will be deleted—it’s ALL reviews of that particular wine. So it’s an all-or-nothing option, meaning that there will be no skewing of the overall average score a particular bottle will receive from WineAlign’s expert panel.

“THAT would be genuinely unfair to consumers,” Szabo says. “If the winery, agent or whomever sends the wine doesn’t like one of the four or five reviews, then every review goes. You can’t cherry-pick the top scores.”

Szabo also cites a particular advantage to the paid service—that submitted wines will not disappear into the ether. For the uninitiated, not every wine submitted to every reviewer is guaranteed a review. Often it’s simple logistics—that it’s not feasible to file a review on every single bottle that arrives on your doorstep. Sometimes it’s other reasons, though—for example, a wine that rates so poorly that the reviewer feels it unworthy to share with consumers, or perhaps to protect a favoured winery or agent.

“What I appreciate—and this is not even my design, it’s (WineAlign founder Bryan McCaw’s)—is that we feel wineries deserve to know that their wines were actually tasted,” says Szabo, who is concerned that “there are a lot of samples that end up in reviewers’ cellars because they never get around to it. How do you know they tasted it, or dumped it down the sink, or gave it as a gift, or returned it to the LCBO for money? At least you know if you send us a wine, it will get reviewed. You’ll get some feedback. And if you’re a winemaker, perhaps you can even learn something. We criticize not to tear down, but to make better. If you’ve sent a bottle in and three months later there’s nothing, well, you’ve wasted your time and a sample and learned nothing. I don’t think that’s fair. We write for consumers, but we’re partnered with industry. We respect those who make the business a business in the first place.”

It will be interesting to see how the new program plays out and if there are any unforeseen issues that crop up.

At this point, the only thing I disagree with Szabo about is the merit of removing bad scores and the accompanying philosophy of only having good wines on the site. As a consumer—whether you’re looking for a gift or something to serve with dinner tonight—knowing what to steer clear of is just as valuable as what they recommend.