Whenever Rowan Gormley criticises the wine trade, the backlash doesn’t take long. His opinions, and those of his company Naked Wine, get repudiated with splenetic enthusiasm. But does such defensiveness reveal that Gormley has in fact uncovered some uncomfortable truths?

In this recent Telegraph interview, Gormley describes wine critics as a nest of vipers, spurning a rapid (albeit relatively mild) reaction on Twitter.

While Gormley may be a wilful provocateur, there is indeed a great deal of truth behind to what he says, painful though it may be for us vipers to admit it.

By anyone’s standards this is a pretty benign and truthful observation, and any wine professional would be arrogant to deny it. After all, the enjoyment of wine is a personal experience, and is inextricably linked with its social context.

And he’s right about this too. The professional language of wine is frequently ridiculous, and it’s easy for those of us who use it daily to become inured to its absurdity.

There is an important qualification to make, however, about who is talking to whom. Most casual wine drinkers have absolutely no interest in tasting notes, and wine professionals often make the mistake of thinking they can communicate with non-engaged drinkers in the same way we talk to each other.

However, for the 0.1% of wine drinkers who are highly engaged, this sort of language has an important function. It might sound pompous, but it is still the best (and only) way that there is to communicate about wine at a complex level. It certainly isn’t a perfect system, but it has endured because, like any system of language, it is invaluable to those who understand and care about it.

Incidentally, something that Naked do brilliantly well is appeal to the subset of wine drinkers that fall between the two extremes: those who find fluent winespeak off-putting, but who are interested enough to seek a closer connection with wine than they get from buying discounted bottles at the supermarket. Ridiculing wine professionals as a marketing tactic might get up our noses but it’s self-evidently effective as a way of appealing to this niche demographic.

Gormley continues:

It may well be true that when a critic wrote positively about Naked, sales weren’t affected. That’s probably because the types of wine drinker that read critics are the highly engaged ones who aren’t interested in the wines that Naked sell (which are nearly all private label with opaque pricing structure).

There are many, many instances I know of where newspaper wine critics have made a seismic difference to wine sales – not least those I witnessed first hand as a manager at Majestic Wine (although that was over ten years ago now, admittedly).

Gormley’s dislike of wine critics hardly seems rational, but perhaps it’s provoked by the industry’s scorn of his business model and irreverent marketing tactics. Incidentally, a telling insight into this philosophy can be made with another quote from the Telegraph piece, when Gormley talks about an early job fitting burglar alarms:

I would posit that many Naked Wines customers feel a similar reassurance from signing up as a Naked ‘angel’, and buying into the club-like mindset that Naked offers, providing them with the appearance of wine knowledge, if not the actual reality of it – and there is arguably nothing wrong with that, assuming you never get burgled.

Later in the piece, there is evidence that Gormley’s attitude to wine is inconsistent.

As the journalist observes, perhaps this hypocrisy is simply an expedient response to feedback. Anyone who has ever sold wine for a living will know the feeling of giving absolutely contradictory opinions to different customers in order to make a sale.

The British wine trade majority have a tendency to despise Naked, and the feeling is apparently mutual. Yet Naked Wine are hugely successful in practicing exactly what the wine trade so often preaches: demystifying wine and bringing it to a new audience.

Yes, their tactics might be unpalatable to some of us, but perhaps rather than reacting with disgust, we should respect the truths behind their success.