As the Michelin Guide turns to wine with its three-grape rating system, here are the big questions
From 2026 the Michelin Guide will continue its brand expansion by turning to rating wine producers.
This will be done on a three-grape scale. The criteria, which are pretty generic, have been listed in the announcement the guide made yesterday.
They will begin with Bordeaux and Burgundy. This raises some very interesting questions, and chief among these for wine producers will be ‘how can we get rated?’
This raises an important point. How will Michelin monetise this?
With their most recent brand extension, a three-key system for hotels, the money is coming from taking a slice of bookings made through the Michelin website.
For wine, perhaps they will follow the model newly adopted for the restaurant guide, which is pay to play. If your city or country is not yet covered by the guide, then Michelin will come and review your restaurants if you pay them.
Tourism New Zealand recently forked out NZ$6.3 million to get Michelin to rate restaurants in its key cities. This is just one example of many. If your city or region wants to have its restaurants included in the guide, then the local tourism body must stump up a considerable amount of cash. And this will likely be on a multi-year cycle, with, say, a contract for five years. It’s expensive. Australia turned the guide down.
If this is the direction that Michelin intend to take to make revenue from a wine guide, then this will have an impact on wine regions worldwide. Pay to play like this will soak up a lot of the marketing budget from regional bodies, with knock on effects on other promotional activities.
A big question concerns where the bar will be set. Starting with Burgundy and Bordeaux is interesting: established regions like these would have no motivation for paying to be rated. If Domaine de la Romanée Conti and Domaine Leroy get 3 grapes, who else shares this level? Will the possession of, say, two grapes, mean that a winery from Central Otago in New Zealand is of the same level as one with two grapes from Burgundy?
Will the ratings be biased towards the classical fine wines, and this sort of model of wine, or will they be equally embracing of more modern approaches to wine, including the growing low-intervention wine movement?
And how much brand equity will Michelin carry from restaurants (where they are established as the benchmark) to wine?
How will Michelin deal with negociant operations in Burgundy who make wines spanning regional to Grand Cru levels? Or, when they travel elsewhere, larger companies such as Penfolds who make wines spanning entry level to world class? This is quite problematic for this sort of system.
The Michelin star rating is useful to consumers and is well established as a benchmark, embraced by the global restaurant industry. How will they gain trust in the wine industry, which is quite different, and is much less experiential? Does the wine industry need this sort of rating system, or are established critic publications focused on individual wines more useful?
Finally, it will be interesting to see who gets to make the ratings.
