The Collective

The other day I had a conversation with a prominent wine writer, columnist, and author. His views are always thought provoking and this conversation was no exception. It was about the future of his profession; a future about which he confessed serious doubts. I assured him that it was just a matter of changing technology. Sure, there was the demise of the newspaper and the magazine, but wasn’t it just a matter of adapting to new technology and broadcasting in a new medium? He disagreed. He said, “Tom, it’s far more serious than that, the younger generation of wine drinker doesn’t trust us. They see the traditional wine expert and critic as the establishment, of whom they are suspicious. They trust the collective.”

This troubled me. First I don’t like change. You learn to adapt to and succeed in a certain environment and then it changes. You succeed in making wine the way three or four critics prefer. You get the high scores and sell out in vintage in a few days. And now you’re telling me we have to start over and learn something new? :>) Second, it was his use of the word “collective.” To me collective brings images from Animal Farm, of Soviet era collectivization of farms and industry, of collective bargaining unions. Are we talking revolution, or is this wine writer being overly pessimistic? After all, we can always learn from the authority or the wine guru. Who, other than the authority, has the time to keep up on new developments, new wines, all that detail and nuance?

Completely unconnected to this, but about the same time, I decided I needed a better way to backup my PC’s hard drives. I’d had a recent hard drive failure and spent two days recovering data. I decided to look for a fast external drive of at least a terabyte. In the 1980’s and early 90’s I would have looked through issues of PC Magazine, read product reviews and comparisons done by experts. In the late 90’s and earlier this decade I would have looked online to the websites of PC Magazine or CNet to find what the same experts had to say.

For nearly two decades I would buy the computer product with the best review from the lowest priced supplier. Despite this, I was often dissatisfied with my purchase. There were the inevitable suppler problems, but too frequently the device didn’t work for me as well as it did for the person who wrote the review. It might be an incompatibility with my equipment, a lousy driver for my application, or a problem common to many users not disclosed in the review. Frequently the device simply didn’t improve performance as much as the expert implied it would. Over time I began to suspect expert reviews. Were the evaluations done under circumstances that exist in the real world? Were these product reviewers too tight with the industry they were reviewing? Were they even reviewing the same device I was buying?

So, a few weeks ago I went about my search for the external hard drive the way a lot of us do today. Without thinking, I went online to trusted suppliers like Newegg, Best Buy, and Amazon. I checked the items they had in stock, and read the reviews of people who had actually purchased the item. I considered real world and varied experiences, not just about the device, but about the store that sold the device. I found a drive that fit my needs, that everyone seemed to love, and at a great price. I ordered it with confidence, and it was delivered to my home two days later. There were no surprises; I love the product.

So, do you see where I’m going with this? Well, here’s where I’m going. The other day I did a survey of wine social networking. I hadn’t checked in on CellarTracker and other social networks for at least a year. At the very moment I write this, CellarTracker claims 80,100 users with 13,246,273 bottles in their database. At this moment there are 952,178 free wine reviews from real users available for me to peruse. My guess is that every day most of those 80,100 users open a bottle of wine from their cellar and many share their experience in a review.

I was shocked. It never occurred to me to use CellarTracker for reviews. I buy wine based on the recommendations of wine merchants I trust. Sometimes I buy based on gurus, critics or winemakers that I trust. Most often, I trust my own experience. It would never occur to me to trust the collective opinion about wine. But, it appears that a whole lot of people may be doing just that.

The members of social networks are seriously reviewing wine. I don’t know who these people are, but their voices seem knowledgeable and self assured. What I found particularly interesting were comments like, “critic x gave this a 95. I don’t think he could have possibly tasted the wine.” So just like the online retailer, the wine critic seems to be getting reviewed along with the wine. And I sensed some irreverence toward wine authority.

I want to know where this is all going. Is there no future for an expert who would broadcast his or her experiences to the public? Is there no value in that? Is social networking the future of wine review and criticism? Are our customers now our wine’s most powerful critic? Are our customers becoming the critics’ most powerful critic? Or has nothing changed; are they still buying based on numerical scores and just talking more publicly about wine with one another?

And if it has become about the collective; are we talking communism or democracy?