By Rob Boyd
Gosh, is it really 30 years? I remember buying one of the early editions of John Platter's Book of South African Wines as a gift for my late father and the guide immediately became an integral part of our wine drinking experience. And it has remained that way for me ever since. Each year I get the new edition and it remains my tried and trusted method of choosing new wines. It is not my only guide to buying a new wine; I may read about a wine elsewhere, in print or on the internet, or I may hear of it by word of mouth or as a recommendation from a wine merchant I trust. I could come across a wine I like at a tasting or at a dinner party. Sometimes I take pot luck.

But in the end the method I most trust when choosing a wine I don't know is to use Platter's South African Wines. And that I think is the key to its 30 years of success. Trust and credibility. It is an easy to use guide, it is comprehensive and there is much of interest besides just the wine ratings, but all of that would count for very little if I didn't trust those ratings.

The tasters and the editorial team are human and they are not going to get it right every single time and with every single wine (in this latest edition they tasted 6000 wines, I believe). There will be anomalies, and they will even occasionally make mistakes. But that matters only a little to the consumer if the vast majority of the ratings conform to a standard (although obviously this would be magnified and matter a great deal to a producer if one of his wines becomes one of those anomalies or mistakes).

Overall, trust remains the key. It is an Agent/Principle relationship, and it relies heavily on trust. One of the wine blog sites I often visit is www.wineeconomist.com and in it Mike Veseth illustrates the relationship thus:

"In economics we see this as an example of the principal-agent problem. You understand the principal-agent problem if you've ever wondered if the cab driver was really taking the shortest route back to the hotel. Although cab driver and rider have entered into a mutually advantageous contract, interests are not fully aligned and the fact of asymmetric information means you may not be sure that you are getting a fair deal."

Wine enthusiasts (the principals) hire critics (the agents) to give us objective advice, but we know that the critics may have their own interests as well as ours in mind. How can we trust them to place our interests above their own?

The simple fact of the matter is that Platter's continues to sell in the numbers that it does because most consumers are like me and trust it to be our agent when it comes to choosing wine. Because most consumers trust it, therefore most producers are happy to be associated with it and as long as the guide continues to conform to the same high standard this happy relationship and synergy should continue.

Internationally, Matt Skinner has just been caught out for recommending wines that he had not tasted. Skinner is famous for his position as wine advisor to Jamie Oliver and also for his book The Juice. Unfortunately a New Zealand wine critic, Michael Cooper, questioned how it was possible for Skinner to have tasted some of the wines he recommended in time for the book to go to the printers. Skinner admitted to having included wines he had not tasted but as worrying as this first offence was he compounds it with a rather glib explanation "It is imperative that I taste all the wines that I recommend. However there are some releases that are consistent from year to year, and as popular, good value and accessible wines I want to include them because I know that my readers will appreciate them."

There was nothing in the tasting notes to suggest that they were not vintage specific and his explanation will not have appeased many.

Also worrying was the response of Hilary Lumsden, commissioning editor to the respected publisher Mitchell Beazley "For our first edition, in 2006, the feedback we got was that by the time people went out and bought the book, the wines were already off the shelves, so the book was effectively out of date. We either upset one side or the other. There's the side that wants the most up-to-date information, and there's Michael Cooper's side. The majority of the wines in The Juice don't rely on vintage variation. A lot of them are going to be consistent each vintage."

Once again a glib excuse, and no admitting to doing wrong. One wonders what Hugh Johnson, Jancis Robinson and Andrew Jefford feel about this statement from a publisher they all share ?

Luckily we have no such problems here at home and I look forward to going out next week and buying my new issue of the Platters guide to help me through another twelve months of wine buying.

[Disclaimer: Rob Boyd has no connection to Platter's South African Wines although he has spoken on the phone to publisher Andrew McDowall once, and also to Philip van Zyl once. Some Grape contributors are closely associated with the guide]