de Marcel Merz
, le 14. décembre 2011 17:45
By Antonio Casado at El Mundo in Spain
Over the last week social networks have been full of photos of two personalities from the world of wine, Jay Miller and Pancho Campo MW. Our paths crossed some years back, and I hope that this brief (or not so brief) recollection will help shed some light on the polemic that has swept across the internet recently. This is how it all began.
It was early 2007: I had only recently embarked on my career with “Vino + Gastronomía” as the technical director of the “Nariz de Oro” and head wine writer at that pernicious establishment, after nearly five years under the infinitely more stimulating and generous wing of José Peñín, when the news broke: Jay Miller, the taster appointed by Robert Parker a few months earlier to taste and score Spanish wines (among others) had just awarded five Spanish wines a score of 100 points.
I knew that he owned (or at least had shares in) a wine merchants in Baltimore, and so I immediately rang up and asked to speak to him. The young woman who answered told me that since joining the team at The Wine Advocate Jay had severed his ties with the business (I assume because of the delicate matter of conflicts of interest), but she ended up by offering to give me his email address. I sent him a very polite and amusing request for an interview, to which he agreed in a matter of hours. I had originally intended to opt for the practical but impersonal approach of sending him a template. But on brief reflection I came up with a better solution. A week later I was on a plane to Washington. From there I took a dilapidated train to Baltimore where Jay, in an extraordinary display of humility, came to meet me at the station.
We had lunch in an indifferent French restaurant, where we drank copious amounts of French wine and spent three hours talking about life, the universe and everything. But, with no recorder to get in the way, we talked mostly about being a critic. My general impression was that he was a nice chap. He seemed affable and pleasant enough: a great eater and drinker but only a mediocre wine taster. Along with the fact that he had never been to Spain, the most significant ‘revelation’ to emerge was how a doctor in child psychology (hence the title of ‘Dr’ which he used at that time) had come by such an important post as a critic. It turned out that he and Robert Parker had been members for decades of a local wine-tasting club, called something like ‘Oenarchs’, or “the kings of wine”. When Parker lost confidence in his old wine-tasting team – I think there was some controversy there as well – he turned to a trusted confidant in preference to someone with a more obvious wine pedigree.
After the meal, prompted no doubt by warm feelings towards me and/or my professional background, he suggested that we should conduct the “official” interview at his home. So he drove me to an old farmhouse some 30 or 40 miles outside the city. It was a sombre one-storey wooden building barely fifteen minutes from Parker’s house. No sooner had we crossed the threshold than all the former brilliance and vivacity of his conversation seemed to desert him, to be replaced by gloom, sadness and a profound melancholy. The reason for this became clear moments later when, before we sat down for the interview, he showed me a fascinating wine cellar that was full not only of the best wines but also of photos of himself and Parker, mostly in France and accompanied by Jay’s wife, who had died barely three years earlier.
It was striking how the critic seemed to have vanished and the whole of his immense being was subsumed by the persona of the relatively recent widower. We went back upstairs and he showed me where he worked. It was a large room with lots of windows, and in the centre there was a great solid wooden table surrounded by a sea of bottles, mostly Chilean wines which he told me he was to embark on tasting the next day.
The secret of the 100 points
Several things struck me. The number of bottles and their random position on the floor suggested that an “optimal tasting temperature” was not one of Jay’s priorities. Nor did he seem worried about respecting the nature of the product, given that whites, reds and rosés were all rubbing shoulders. And the numerous cats with which Jay shared his home (in what I assumed to be a logical attempt to counter his loneliness) were making themselves at home among the labels of a sauvignon blanc: it occurred to me that the note of “cat’s piss” traditionally attributed to it would be particularly appropriate on this occasion. I was also surprised to find that the only item on the table was the English edition of the 2007 guide produced by my master, José Peñín, for which I had been the coordinator and chief taster (tasting nearly 5,000 of the 7,500 wines sampled); this had been my last piece of work for the Arga publishing house just a few months earlier.
Jay’s surprise on seeing my photograph on the inside cover was as great as mine when I discovered, back in Spain, that most of the scores awarded by The Wine Advocate to Spanish wines that year were suspiciously close to the ones in Peñín’s guide. We finally sat down to an interview that turned out to be less stimulating than I had anticipated because, as noted earlier, once in his own home Miller’s mood had become tinged with melancholy. The most notable revelation was that his “five 100s” for Spanish wines were the product of a simple formula which was down to the fact that our man had found himself between a rock and a hard place. His boss, Robert Parker, had awarded the five wines a score of 99 for the previous 2003 vintage. As it was clear that the 2004 vintage was notably better, Miller had no choice but to raise the score by a precise and obligatory one point.
With the long lunch and the drive to his home the day had lasted longer than I had expected, and in the rush to get back to Baltimore I left my jacket hanging on a hook in the hall. I asked for it back later, but he said that he couldn’t find it at his house. I suspect that the cats had turned it into an exact replica of Buffalo Bill’s fringed jacket.
Two years later, in the Spring of 2009, I was about to return from Ciudad Real on the shuttle train after the final day of the Spanish wine fair, Fenavin. Just a few minutes before the train was due to depart I ran across the newly crowned Master of Wine (MW), Pancho Campo, and his extensive entourage in the station bar. Amongst his most fervent acolytes was Esteban Cabezas, then director of the equally new Wine Academy of Spain, with whom I sat for the length of the hour-long journey. Fuelled by excitement, the high-speed train and his equally high-speed speech, Esteban told me that they were looking for a wine taster very much like me: someone with an exhaustive knowledge of Spanish wine who could speak English, and who could take Pancho’s place on some courses he had undertaken to give in the States but which he was unable to deliver – officially for health reasons.
At the end of June, he rang me at two days’ notice to say that the “casting” was going to take place the following weekend. The first day involved getting to know Pancho and his tasting method. This was the same method – albeit perhaps somewhat simplified – as that used by the Masters of Wine and the WSET, whose courses are a prerequisite for achieving the Master of Wine qualification. My memories from that day are of Pancho Campo’s mastery of the cadences of his address and the patent mediocrity of his method of identifying wines in the blind tasting, which is an essential part of the WSET’s tasting training.
At the end of the day we were each required to prepare a half-hour presentation on a particular region for the following morning. I was given the Rías Baixas region. The next morning the tasters gave their presentations. None offered any enlightenment and all failed to prompt the slightest flicker of emotion in Pancho. But after my presentation he quite literally burst into spontaneous public applause.
Naturally, I do not have his stage presence – that amazing total command of the platform – and I suspect I never will. But I judge that I acquitted myself well during my half hour, demonstrating sufficient knowledge of the region and ability in English.
My prize was to be awarded the first of the courses in the States, which was to take place in Denver, Colorado, barely two weeks later. The night before the flight I finally received the PowerPoint of the course via Esteban Cabezas, who was due to accompany me in his role as director of the Spanish Wine Academy. The delay and the poor quality of the material did not augur well. For a start, it could not by any stretch of the imagination be considered sufficient for a three-day programme. My worst fears were amply confirmed when we arrived in Denver only to discover that we would not be receiving some of the wines we were due to taste on the course. Esteban decided to replace the missing wines with others of abysmal quality bought at knock-down prices from a local shop.
The course had been devised by Pancho Campo and promoted as a sort of Masters in Spanish wine. It consisted of two days of fairly superficial introductions to the various wine-producing regions, with tastings of wines from each region, followed by a third day involving two exams for the students. One exam was a simple test covering any topic addressed on the first two days. The second was a blind tasting in which students had to identify eight wines from those tasted on the previous days. But as they were given a list of the wines – and, for example, fortified wines are easy to spot by their colour and type – any doubts could easily be resolved by a simple process of elimination.
Right from the start the students displayed very high standards of tasting and knowledge, and very low levels of patience with the banalities of the programme (such as the sections on Andalusia giving pride of place to the “rebujito” and the “Feria” in Seville) and the poor quality of the wines. And so, in spite of my efforts and the efforts of Esteban Cabezas (who, to be honest, was more interested in sticking religiously to Pancho’s programme than appeasing the growing anger of the students), after the lunch break a small deputation approached me on behalf of the majority to tell me that if we did not change the format and content (i.e. the entire course!) they would withdraw en masse and demand their course fee back (which I think was around $500).
They said that they appreciated my willingness and my knowledge of tasting in English, but they were not prepared to put up with Esteban constantly interrupting my presentation in an excess of managerial zeal. In effect, he interrupted whenever I departed from the original programme or criticised the quality of the wines. (Let’s not forget that some of these had been bought for three dollars, and while they were completely new to us, they had no doubt previously assaulted the taste buds of more than one of the students, and no amount of flowery language could save them from the fire of criticism.)
Cabezas was naturally extremely annoyed at this unexpected gathering: he dubbed it an “attempted mutiny”, and refused to change the programme at all. At this point, almost by accident, he let the cat out of the bag. It was not only the wine producers who were paying large sums to have their wines featured: money had also been extracted from various parts of government, supervisory bodies and others involved in the sector in return for a mention in the States. This “financial agreement” was the only acceptable basis for the course programme, and they couldn’t care less about anything else.
The whole murky affair culminated with the presentation on Murcia. The Murcia Region and the Jumilla Appellation of Origin had paid their dues and were therefore included in the presentation, while Bullas and Yecla were consigned to ignominious oblivion. To tell the truth, it was hard to find the words to explain a situation in which certain wine producers in the Region were deemed not to be of the Region, if you follow my drift…
Fenavin 2011
In return for all his efforts Esteban Cabezas ended up being owed more than €30,000 by Pancho. Not long ago he was saying that he “didn’t want to come within 10,000 kilometres of him”.
With good humour and some sweet talking things calmed down for the next two days. But I couldn’t help feeling ridiculous and that in the students’ eyes I had become the living embodiment of a fraud (or at least its hatchet man). That feeling has been confirmed by comments posted on various forums, including Jim Budd’s blog, by former students from my course and subsequent courses. (While I wasn’t prepared to carry on with the courses, others took over from me.) Meanwhile, the real perpetrator of the fraud was holed up in his mansion in Marbella, no doubt planning another episode in his unique and “altruistic” crusade in aid of the international good name of Spanish wine. Pancho Campo gave the starring role in this latest episode to the lead character in our story, namely our sombre and well-intentioned widower, Dr Jay Miller.
Back to Fenavin, this time to the fair immediately after the one which led to my acquaintance with Pancho Campo, i.e. the most recent one, held in 2011. I was tasting at the stand run by the people from Ercavio, along with that wonderful wine expert and delightful friend Gonzalo Rodríguez, when our illustrious MW appeared at the end of the aisle with the formidable human form of Jay Miller following a few steps behind. Pancho greeted me and told me of his plans for a forum in Singapore. He turned slightly to introduce me to an unsteady Jay, who recognised me and opened his mouth, black from tasting, to make a great joke of swearing blind that he had never worn the jacket that I’d left at his house. (As if he could: he’s three times my size!)
I knew that Pancho had been parading him across Spain for several months, as there had been a lot of coverage on the social networks and it had sparked some controversy. For those people prepared to argue that it is normal to ask supervisory bodies and wine producers to pay tens of thousands of euros for a visit from Jay, this type of enterprise practically counts as voluntary work. (Peñín has been travelling the length and breadth of Spain for free for years, both in my company and without me.) For others, myself included, there is something inherently fishy about it. I know that on recent visits Jay Miller has made the wineries sign a document to certify that he has not been paid anything for the visits, in a belated attempt to cover his back. What is certainly true is that those requests for money did take place, and were sent and signed by Pancho or one of his associates.
But perhaps what rankles most is the way in which Pancho has tried in some of these documents (recently published on Jim Budd’s blog) to use Miller as a human shield in order to justify the high prices charged! In other words, he has been telling all and sundry that Jay demands fees (sic) of such and such an amount (around € 20,000 a day), but apparently he’s such a nice chap he would be willing to reduce them a bit.
Indeed, in an email sent from Italy to his sales director, who forwarded it to the Vinos de Madrid Appellation of Origin, Campo stated that “Private visits like this one, outside the official programme, are very rarely available and cost at least 40,000 euros. It’s amazing that Jay has agreed to stay on for 2 days at half his usual price. The opportunity is unlikely to be repeated.”
I don’t know the extent of Jay Miller’s involvement in Pancho’s scheme. But in my view, based on the characters of the people involved (which I have tried to portray in this article) the most plausible hypothesis is that the savvy individual has led the biddable one by the nose. For me, it also goes to show that, in spite of the accolades that come with the MW tacked onto his name like a double-barrelled surname, Pancho Campo knows that he will never attain the heights of being a “specifier” like Peñín or Miller. He knows that his only road to fame depends on other more prosaic abilities, including those which have recently brought him fame but which have heaped so much suspicion on a sector that could really do without it.
I hope that someone explains to Jay how Pancho has painted him as the demanding consultant on €20,000 a day in literature produced in Spanish. When Jay finds out, as he stands in the dole queue, he won’t find it funny. And our portly American taster might just have friends in Interpol.
Reprinted from El Mundo with permission. The original Spanish article is here. Our interview with Pancho Campo MW can be found here. Our investigation of the Campo-Miller saga can be found here.
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