Behind the gold stickers: Interview with Andrew Jefford, Decanter World Wine Awards Co-Chair

Renowned wine writer, Andrew Jefford, has been judging at the Decanter World Wine Awards since 2004. He’s seen wine trends come and go, but manages to keep an open mind when presented with a set of new wines to judge. I caught up with him for half an hour backstage during the 2021 DWWA judging week to talk about a whole bevy of topics, including who benefits from wine competitions, how he started out in the world of wine, celebrity wines, wine influencers and what it really means to have a DWWA label stuck on a bottle.

You were first a DWWA judge in 2004. How have the wines shown changed over the years and can you pick out any key trends that might have been ‘of their time’ and others that have displayed longevity?

Obviously a key trend, and one I’m really happy about, is that we get many fewer grossly oaky wines. The whole idea that fine wine meant lots of oak barrel is definitely on the way out and I’m really happy about that. You get a lot more pure-fruited wines. ‘Finesse’ is very much a valued quality nowadays, whereas it wasn’t, perhaps in the same way, back in the early 2000s, when people were still trying to produce very impressive wines - blockbusters - that sort of style. A lot of that has gone now.

In Italy it’s very striking, the way people have gone back to traditional ageing techniques. One of the very interesting things about Italian fine wine is that, contrasting to French fine wine, which was sold relatively young and it was up to you to age it if you wanted, the Italians go halfway to ageing it for you. A good Brunello or a good Barolo is presented in semi-aged fashion, whereas when they switched to little barrels, it didn’t work as well. The wines came out very dark, full of evident oak, and they needed ageing. But they’ve gone back to using the ‘botte’ - the big oak vats - and now you can by a bottle of Brunello of the latest vintage, 2016, and it’s already a semi-maturing wine, which is lovely. So, that is a very important change. 

After that, really, I think you have to look at every wine culture on its own terms and, of course, that’s something we try and do at Decanter World Wine Awards - we always see things in their cultural context. Australia is very marked because alcohol became a big concern there amongst the wine community, so that was something that changed quite a lot. The percentage became like a mark of shame - to send a wine to market at 14.5% - even though very often the climate and the location and the variety meant that it really ought to be 14.5%. 

France, I think, stylistically it has remained pretty true to itself because every region is different and every region has its own parameters. I think there is a big change in Bordeaux towards more elegance and freshness, rather than trying to produce impressive wine. That’s particularly true at the fine wine level.

You’ve been writing and broadcasting about wine since the 1980s - how did that start for you and what were your first jobs?

I initially started working in publishing as an editor, but I sort of got frustrated with that. I always loved wine, since I was about 16, when I first began to make wine at home out of currants, elderflower and grape juice concentrate. That got me very interested in the process, then I began to acquire culture by reading and by trying. So, after four years of publishing I was wanting to write about something or other and I loved wine. I moved into wine writing on a freelance basis, combining it with editing for a certain period and then, gradually, the writing took off and I’ve done that ever since. 

I love it particularly because it touches on so many other things - it’s culturally very rich. I think one of the problems maybe with wine journalism at the moment is that it is often very focused on the subject itself - it has a sort of geeky side and I don’t like that so much. To me, it’s more interesting if you can draw other things into the subject and that’s always what I’ve tried to do in my work. The geographical aspect of it is fascinating, the geological aspect is fascinating.

The way Italians see wine is different, the way the Spanish see wine is different from the way French see wine.

Social media has been a key tool in my wine communication. I see you have a blog and an Instagram account - what do you feel about the role of social media in terms of wine communication?

We live in a world of social media - it is significant, it is very important - there’s no question of that. As to how well you do it, that’s an interesting thing. Again, I think it’s something where the more imagination, really, you can bring to bear on the interaction, the better. Honestly, my heart sinks when I just see another set of bottle shots - it’s just so dull and repetitive and sort of meaningless in a way because wine is so complex, it’s so fractured, it’s so atomised. There are so many potential bottles that so many of us could drink tonight, so whether you drink this bottle or that bottle, it’s neither here nor there. I’m always looking for people who can do it in more of a creative way, drawing people in and firing up enthusiasm via other means as well. 

It is visual if you can travel, but travel is expensive and, of course, we haven’t been able to travel. But if you’re able to do that, that’s quite a good way of doing it. I also think the human stories are incredibly important. I’d much rather spend time on an Instagram post where there’s a photograph of somebody and someone has troubled to describe a little bit of their life and their philosophy and their work, than just another set of bottle shots.

And then, of course, there’s the whole influencer thing nowadays. To me, it’s not going to work in the long-run, because if you’re paid to promote a product, you’re not going to ever develop a reputation. It’s going to be short-lived. In the long-run you have to be able to offer a bit more than that, I think.

What challenges do you think the wine industry faces when it comes to communicating about wine to its consumers?

The big challenge with the wine world is that it’s complicated and it sort of has to be complicated because that’s the way it works. This is why it’s never really taken off on TV because when you’re watching people taste wine, it’s not very interesting, so you have to tell them things about wine. You can tell them by travelling around the world, but that’s very expensive and nobody wants to spend the money on that. So, after that, how do you do it?

Oz Clarke did it terrifically well because he’s a very good communicator and that’s great. But it’s always a big challenge because there’s always this hurdle of knowledge. You have to be able to cope with foreign names, for example, you have to be able to absorb an amount of basic information in order to find your way around the wine world, geographically and in terms of varieties and so on and so forth. And these are actually very big obstacles for a lot of people. 

It’s hard to count the number of times you hear people say, “I had this wonderful wine,” and you ask what it was and they say, “I can’t remember,” because it’s complicated to remember the name of a wonderful wine you had. It gets a bit easier if you can take a picture. There is this knowledge obstacle with wine that doesn’t exist with food, for example.

The other thing is that wine is a luxury, nobody has to drink wine. We all have to eat three times a day, so food matters in a sort of existential way, whereas wine is part of the cream on the cake aspect of it. 

What would you say is the role of a wine competition? Who does it benefit?

That’s a very good question because there are multiple answers, actually. The obvious answer is drinkers - people want a good recommendation for a nice bottle and that is very, very important. That’s why when I’m talking to judges, I’m always stressing, “Please judge for ordinary drinkers, who just want to drink a nice bottle. Please take that into account - don’t be a policeman, don’t be an examiner, don’t be an interrogator. Be an enthusiast - drink and taste like that. And remember always the drink in context. It’s easy for super oaky, super dark, super concentrated wines to get a medal, but they’re the sort of wines where you have a glass and you go, “Do I really want another drink of that?”, whereas there’s this beautiful bottle of Beaujolais which just drinks beautifully, lovely fruit. That deserves a medal, too. 

What we’ve noticed, after having run the competition for some time, is that obviously we offer stickers for producers to buy and therefore market on that basis, but not everybody will send off for their stickers. You realise that, very often, they were entering the competition to benchmark their own wines - in other words to see how well it does, what these judges think about it, whether they like it, what kind of quality level it’s assessed at for its price - because we do take price into account. So, it also has quite an important benchmarking role as well, I think. It’s not just the end consumer.

And then, having gone and met producers, who have won medals in the competition, you realise that, often, it means quite a lot to them. That’s fantastic. So, it’s to keep them motivated, to keep them excited and engaged in what they’re doing. That sort of validation is very important. So, there’s at least kind of three end uses, I think. 

As you’ve said, there are many wine competitions out there. Why do you think the DWWAs are still so highly revered?

It is the biggest, which is significant. I take part in other wine competitions as well and I truly don’t think that any other wine competition is, a) as well organised and, b) is as well-judged by people with equivalent experience. That means that it has become a sort of international benchmark in its own right and I’m very proud and privileged to be a part of that.

It hasn’t acquired it instantly - it’s taken 18 years so far, but it really is respected around the world because of the quality of the judging, the judging process. The time we take over discussing things, for example, is very important. Nobody’s immediately right about a wine, ever. It’s always interesting to hear other people’s opinions, so that whole collegiate, discursive aspect is very important as well.

What are your thoughts on English wine right now? Any favourites?

I’m a big enthusiast for English wine. One of my closest friends is a guy called Peter Hall at Breaky Bottom. I’ve been going there for over 30 years - he’s one of my oldest friends. When I first went there, things were very difficult - money was very short, English wine was a joke, nobody took it seriously. To see the complete 180 degree transformation in the last 30 years has been absolutely astonishing. So, I love Breaky Bottom, but Peter’s a close friend, so perhaps because of that you should set it aside.

But there are some other very good wines. You know, in our competition, some of the wines from Chapel Down, particularly from the Kit’s Coty vineyard, have shown very, very well, so I have had huge admiration for that. Wiston wines, all of the work from Dermot Sugrue, is very impressive, great work there. Gusborne, I think, is doing a very good job too and there are many others. I’m rather sad that I haven’t had the chance to do a comprehensive tasting in the last couple of years because I’ve lived in France, actually, for the last 11 years. But I would love to have the chance to do that because it’s obviously a very exciting scene with a huge amount to discover.

What do you think of Decanter magazine’s new look?

It was long overdue to have a redesign, so I like it. We were talking a little bit earlier about social media and how bored I get with looking at bottle shots and the old standard for Decanter was always to have two or three bottles on the cover, every month, month after month. So, really happy to get away from that and it does look more sophisticated, more contemporary, more elegant, so long overdue. I like it and it looks nice.

I read your column about Kylie’s rosé - I also reviewed it a few months ago and hit the same point - that celebrity wines will open up the wine world to new drinkers, which I think is a great thing. Do you think you will have challenged the views of traditional Decanter readers?

I hope so. I should nuance what I’m going to say a little bit in that I also wrote a column a few months earlier where I slightly had a go at the luxury end of things and using celebrity names to sell luxury wines. Obviously the celebrity name in those cases put another £30 on the bottle of Champagne and stuff like that. What I liked about the Kylie initiative was that it was accessible to ordinary people - these were not forbiddingly expensive wines. Her basic rosé is a Vin de France, but it is very well-made. When I then had a chance to chat to her, she really was personally invested in the project. She’d taken it seriously, she’d done the tastings, she’d got involved. It wasn’t just sort of signing off on a brand extension. So, I think, given that it wasn’t luxury goods - that’s very important because I hate the way that the wine world has become the luxury goods world. I detest and loathe that and I will always range myself against that to some extent because to me that’s a bad idea. This was authentic, accessible and you had somebody whose name means a lot to a lot of people. And the wines were quite good, so those were the important things to me. That can only be a good thing because some people may never have even tried wine and they are going to try it because it’s got her name on the bottle, and they’re going to think, “Hmm, you know, this is rather nice. I thought wine was all sour and horrible, but this isn’t - it’s great.” It’s brings more diversity to the wine world, which it really needs.

Overall - I almost surprised myself - but I thought, “Yeah, this is really a good idea, this is great.” Nobody’s being ripped off here, which I think I put in my article. That was the contrast with what I had written three months earlier, where the use of names was ripping people off a little bit. Like everything in life, you have to nuance the details. 

As a wine judge, do you find it difficult to put aside preconceptions about certain countries? I recently did a post on ‘Thank you, Next!’ wines, where wine drinkers admit to already making up their minds about a wine before even trying it.

Well, I think probably having done it for 30 years - and also personally I’m very set against preconceptions - I hate that. I like to challenge myself all the time, I like to re-think things, you know - question yourself. You’re always wrong about a whole lot of stuff. I hope I don’t have those kinds of preconceptions. The last judging job I did was judging a Romanian wine competition because I hadn’t had a chance to look at Romanian wines for a while. It’s a great wine culture - they love wine, they’ve been making wine for a long time. Moldova is the most wine-cultured place in the whole world… I would always try and keep an open mind if possible and I would always urge everybody that you communicate with - ‘never think that this isn’t for me, because you can always be surprised in the world of wine’. It’s just full of surprise.

Which countries should be expect some big things from this year? 

The problems at the moment are climate change problems. Well, we’ve had political problems - which are probably getting a little bit easier now. If you’re a US consumer, there’s a problem with the tariffs and so on. There’s still political frictions in the world, of course, but they don’t affect the wine world in the same way that they did. Climate change is posing a lot of problems - there have been some super hot vintages recently. Frost has suddenly been a big problem, again, in the last two years, actually - and in 2017 and in 2016. That’s becoming a real issue, because buds are breaking earlier and therefore you’re much more prone to any kind of cold snap that happens, even in early April. So, I wouldn’t particularly say France in 2021 because France has been very badly hit with frost in 2021. 

In terms of the places that I’m very interested in - Georgian wine. Now, Georgian wine is not new - it’s 8,000 years old. It’s the oldest of all, but that to me is a place to look for a good source of wine. And then, there are other bits and pieces in any individual countries. In Spain, for example, the wines of Galicia and Bierzo - those wines up in the north. 

Really, I find it quite a hard question to answer because almost wherever you look, somebody is doing something interesting. So, I wouldn’t ever say that somewhere is not interesting - and that is the great thing about wine. Everything is changing every year. There is a constant churn of innovation and new effort and new aspiration. So, I wouldn’t really write anywhere off - everywhere can surprise us. You know, Bordeaux is surprising people. It’s such an old, established region, but it’s changing all the time and the wines of Bordeaux now are very different in style to the way they were 20 years ago, so everywhere has the potential to surprise and change.

Finally, are there any key trends regarding flavour profiles and styles of wine in 2021? 

Well, rosé plays a big role and I think it’s still got a long way to go, actually. We’ve barely scratched the surface and that’s quite interesting because great rosé works in a different way from great white and great red. It’s not as demonstrative, it’s a wine of understatement and of nuance. 

Actually, judging for those qualities in this competition is a lovely challenge. I used to be in charge of the regional France panel for quite a long time, which had Provence, and now it’s a separate panel of its own. It is quite hard to get beyond the “paler the better” style, but that’s only the colour. Then, do you look for a vivid acid balance in a rosé, for example? Provence doesn’t have that - it’s quite creamy, it’s quite soft. That’s what a lot of people like about it. But it’s noticeable that when Languedoc tries to do rosé, often it ends up with a more vivid acid balance than it does in Provence, partly because they are aesthetically styling it differently, partly because of grape varieties and locations. 

Then, the possibilities. Prosecco rosé: this is the first year for Prosecco rosé and it’s already so big they’re having shortages of Pinot Noir in the Veneto. That can work terrifically well and that opens up all sorts of possibilities for sparkling wines from elsewhere. Provence itself is beginning to think, “We’ve got all of this wonderful rosé, why can’t we do it in a sparkling way too?” So, we’ll see a lot more of that kind of wine. With this pretty colour, petal pink - I once heard it called ‘Melancholy Pink’ - if you make classic bottle-fermented rosé, it takes time, and you can easily lose that colour during the process, which is why very few rosé Champagnes have that hue. You can do it much better with the tank-fermented Prosecco method. That’s why it’s going to work very well in that sort of way. 

I happened to be in Canada at the beginning of last year - it was the last bit of travel I did before the big lockdown - and on Vancouver Island there was somebody making a lovely tank-fermented pale pink sparkler of that sort, so we’re going to see those popping up all over the world. I mean, keep your eyes peeled - it’s going to work very often very well.

In general, amongst fine wines, I would say this move to freshness and vivacity and not looking for all-out everything, certainly oak playing a less and less significant role, is a very important trend too.

White wines - people are retreating from big, buxom, yellow, deep, dark, unctuous wines, but I think the white wine aesthetic is still quite broad. There have been less key developments there than there have been in rosé and red. 

To read about the results of the Decanter World Wine Awards, 2021, head to this article here.