Current activities
Since 1987 I have been working
as an independent wine consultant for my dutch firm Enoconsult. My consultancy
activities are numerous (Curriculum Vitae).
For the last 20 years my main activity has been assisting medium sized
wine importers with their wine imports: making selections (wine scouting),
managing the communication with suppliers and promoting the selected wines.
How it started
Most of the wines I taste for
these selections are not exciting, but just average, some of them even
bad in style and quality. On the other hand I come across wines that are
good, very good or excellent. Some of them did not fit in the portfolio
of the already mentioned wine importers. These (but also other) highly interesting
wines deserve it to find their way to the consumer, providing pleasure
and satisfaction: the main reason for the existence of wine. Giving these
good wines the opportunity to find an importer or a wider distribution
seemed to me the right thing to do. The idea was born to start winescout.info,
the podium on which wines who fully deserve it can be presented to the
world.
Can importers benefit?
Do you have to pay for the
expertise and information of Winescout.info? You are a good scout
yourself. Is Winescout.info selecting as good as you are? Does Winescout.info
share the same selection criteria (see selection criteria) ? Aren’t
there many other renown sources of information of wine critics available?
What is Winescout.info offering differently or extra compared with the
established critic’s information?
Yes,
importers can hugely benefit from Winescout.info's information.
*
it is free ;
*
it is objective, professional and honest;
*
the approach is different from the established critics; (selection
criteria)
*
easy access to the producer or export agent: complete address, tel. and
faxnrs, e-mail address.
Who is paying and why?
Not the importer is paying
the costs for this expertise and web site, but the producer who wants to
export his wine. That is the one who needs a platform. How can you be
objective when the producer pays for the information? (This is an essential
question,
but always ask as well: how objective can a critic be,
in a magazine which is also publishing adverts of importers / producers
or wines mentioned in this magazine?)
Yes, Winescout.info is objective
Financially I am not dependent
on winescout.info, but that may be not a strong argument for you. Most
important I have a reputation to keep up. A strong, single-minded, but
capable, honest and straight reputation built during the years since 1987.
But still I advise you not to believe anyone for the first time. In our
profession you have to be cautious and sometimes even suspicious. Only
the wine will tell the whole truth.
Always decide yourself
I strongly advise importers:
always ask the producer to send a sample of the wine I recommend (same
lotnr.!) and then make up your own mind. Even if the wine is not of your
liking, there is no risk for you involved.
Why are only good wines mentioned?
Would it not be wiser to
publish also comments on wines which are not good or even bad? I think
not. Because it would take a lot of valuable space in this web site and
it would take a lot of my time and effort to publish them (most of the
wines are rejected), an other argument is that you can be horribly wrong
in judging a wine during a specific phase of its development and finally
I can not and will not ask a producer to pay for a negative exposure.
Has Winescout.info delivered
its promise?
The answer is a clear Yes!
And it continues to do so. For both importers and producers Winescout.info
has proven its value. Many producers have found an importer for their very
good wines because of the positive evaluations published in winescout.info.
Another interesting and important fact for producers is that all wines
from the winescout.info selection are indexed by all the major search engines
such as Google, most of the time as the first reference, because of the
tasting evaluations in this web site. Quotations from and references to
the positive tasting evaluations in Winescout.info also proved to be an
excellent supportive marketing tool.