One of the core goals of any good wine writer should be to give consumers the tools to educate themselves. Almost everyone agrees that wine is intimidating and makes people anxious. By making it seem less arcane, the thinking goes, consumers will be more likely to embrace wine as a pleasure, rather than shun it as a burden.

“I believe that the most valuable thing wine writers can do is to help consumers develop confidence enough to think for themselves.”

But do the bottle reviews help to achieve this goal? I would say they do not. In fact, they do the opposite. By subjecting seemingly every bottle to evaluation, year in and year out, these reviews convey the sense that the quality of a wine is random.

With nothing else to go on but these reviews, consumers are not liberated by knowledge; instead they are bound to reviewers, dependent on the direction of the critical thumb. The best consumers can do is to learn whether their own tastes correlate with one reviewer’s more than another’s.

I believe that the most valuable thing wine writers can do is to help consumers develop confidence enough to think for themselves. This can best be achieved by helping consumers gain enough knowledge to make their own buying decisions without the crutch of the bottle review .

For one thing, bottle reviews are not that trustworthy. More than any other beverage, wine is subject to the context in which it is drunk. Perceptions of a particular wine change depending on your mood, what you are eating, the weather, how long a bottle has been opened, how long it’s been in a glass, the temperature of the wine, whether you are listening to music and countless other considerations.

For that reason, reviewers often try to eliminate context by paring away these outside elements. All that is left, and all that is judged, the thinking goes, is what’s in the glass.

Is that a good thing? I’m not convinced. Usually, wines are scored in mass tastings where very little time can be devoted to each bottle. The critics taste, spit so as to diminish the effects of alcohol, evaluate, maybe taste and spit once more, and move on to the next glass.