Who dares to make a statement about the quality of wine?

Separating the good from the bad is an unavoidable neccesity in the life of a wine merchant. First you have to weed out the poor wines and then the feeble semantics.

Digression:
I worked for more than fifteen years with an experienced wine colleague named Jürgen Prehm. He regularly annoyed me. We organized public wine tastings for laypeople interested in wine.We tried to teach the topology and typology of wine. What it is and what it is called. But the students all wanted to acquire a very specific ability. How to recognize a good wine? To my chagrin, Prehm always liked to answer exactly this question in the following way. When he answered, he looked me straight in the eye and said: "I can't say what's good or bad, but I know what I like."

I wanted to scream. He knew he could get my goat with this. Because we at rotweiss follow the approach for the purposes of product selection, quality is real and can only be measured objectively. Preference is another thing all together.

Quality - a much abused term. Nobody knows what it is, but we are sure of one thing: when it comes to wine, it is not subjective. 

Quality within the manufacturing process is the hunt for deviations from a standard. The fewer deviations, the higher the quality. We wine merchants should all have the sensory ability to detect wine defects. If we miss this task, our quality suffers.

Shitty job, but someone has to do it. We educate ourselves and pay attention to quality.

“Quality is relative,” you hear. This means that a standard or classification is possible by comparing something similar.

Take Rioja for example. There is Rioja for 3.99 and 30.00. What is expected from a Rioja for 3.99? If the wine is fresh, has no cork defects, has not suffered transport or storage damage, it can be said to be of a certain quality. Which brings us back to the errors. One of the most important technical advances that drives quality is the integration of laboratory controls into the filling process. The laboratory is one wall away from the bottling plant. Samples are taken throughout the entire filling process. The samples run through an analysis scanner. If the test parameters (especially oxygen) are exceeded, the bottling line stops. Bad wine is not being produced. Nobody is sending defective products into the marketplace. It might be boring but it not defective.

If we want more performance, we need to move to a different price range. If there are no serious errors because the wine dealer has been paying attention, a progression in price to performance can be expected. More money, more fun.

Because the supermarkets offer carelessly sterile filtered wines with relatively few manufacturing defects up to 4.99, we ensure that our wines for € 6.99 stand out as sexy and super cool. Our wines for €8.95 taste like €15.00. It would be nice if we could claim that the progression continues and that our wines for€30.00 taste like €45.00. But that would be nonsense. At some point around €12.00 the quality levels off and becomes constant.

The wine in specialist wine shops - i.e. all of our wines - must be “best of class”. This can only be achieved with an objective view of goodness and quality.