thewinegang.com is a new website set up by five of the UK’s most influential wine critics. They give a comprehensive assessment of wines sold in Britain, but it’s just as relevant to us in Malta given that many of the same wines are sold here. You have to pay a membership fee to gain access to monthly reports and the most interesting areas of the site, but if you are really keen on wine, then you might think this worthwhile for your purposes.
The idea is behind it is a simple one – not allowing the wealth of information to go to waste that these wine critics accumulate between them in the course of their working lives. Every week they attend a host of tastings, restricted to the press and the wine trade, but because of the limited coverage that wine receives in the media they work for, much valuable information never reaches the consumer. Now, their independent assessment of at least 200 wines per month is going on line. They are 100 per cent independent. They do not accept wine advertising, so there is no potential for a conflict of interest. They work as a team, rather than as a bland committee, and each wine is reviewed by one of them, cross-checking with the others. They don’t blind-taste the wines, which means that they know before they taste them how much the wines cost, what standard to expect, and what their true value is. That way, they can judge both quality and value for money. They are not reluctant to say so when wines don’t cut the mustard, and they offer unrivalled access to the facts on most of the wines available on Europe’s most diverse wine consumer market: Britain’s. That means if you’re shopping for wine in Malta, the list has you pretty well covered, too.