A wine critic takes off the blinders of complicity

I was trained as a wine critic to view “blind tasting” as the gold standard of evaluation. When you’re reviewing wines, I was taught, you taste blind, typically from bottles sheathed in brown paper bags, so as to avoid being influenced — consciously or not — by the label, the price and, most of all, the producer’s reputation.

I still think blind tasting is the best and fairest way for a critic to gauge her true opinion of a wine’s quality. But now more than ever, I’m aware that its results have limited applications. Blind tasting can tell me whether a wine is good. But blind tasting cannot tell me whether a wine is worth celebrating — indeed, whether a wine is worth writing about at all.

Few other realms of criticism have such a tidy term for it, but the question of whether or not to “taste blind” is the most urgent one facing all critics today, whether they review wine or movies or books or restaurants. Do we take into account a subject’s context when determining whether and how to cover it?

For example, in light of the sexual misconduct allegations against the owners of Pizzaiolo, Boot & Shoe Service, Penrose, Four Barrel Coffee, Tosca Cafe, Bottega and Coqueta, should The Chronicle’s food and wine team refuse to celebrate them? For this critic, the answer has to be yes. That’s partly because, as my colleague Paolo Lucchesi writes, we are obliged to acknowledge our complicity as food media in promoting a system that allows harassment to continue, and encourages victims to put up with it. It’s partly because, as critics and as diners, we can afford to go elsewhere: It’s not as if Penrose is the Bay Area’s only good cocktail bar, or Four Barrel our only good local coffee roaster.

So on some level, this is about activism. We have an opportunity here to shift the paradigm of how we respond to business’ known problematic behavior. Opportunities like that don’t come along every day, and I believe it’s our obligation to take it.

But the core reason why I believe we should stop celebrating these businesses is even simpler. It’s about service to our readers.

It’s about service because our readers live in a world in which context matters. They look to critics to provide many pieces of information besides the quality of the final product, whether it’s a bottle of wine, a meal at a restaurant or a vegetable in the grocery store. If we draw attention to the fact that a business is locally owned, uses fair-trade products or favors organic produce, we have no excuse for not drawing attention to how the business treats its workers.

If we don’t, we’re not just failing the workers; we’re also failing our readers.