What we need, instead of wine writers with their Olympian observations about this wine or that, is a serious movement to educate the public about the wines of the world, their basic differences, their healthful and beneficial qualities, and their general place in the whole scheme of gracious living. Nor do we need someone who erects a 100-point scale to judge wines, throws away the first 50 points, and then makes a big deal about a wine scored as 87 against one that scores a mere 85, according to him. Certainly bad wines are made and marketed. The grape is amazingly perceptive about climatic influences, and the mood it projects in a finished wine tells us a lot about how it felt during the growing season. A temperate, moderately dry summer with good ripening heat toward autumn does the opposite.
Any winemaker can make a good wine then.
Despite the vicissitudes, wine of some sort has to be made every year. Good winemakers can succeed in making very palatable wines in the worst of years, only to be damned by a wine writer who has never set foot in a vineyard or a winery, and has heard that 19XX was a poor vintage. Ideally, the only way for a consumer to learn about wines is to drink them. At today's prices, that can be expensive, but there are ways of sampling and learning about wines with relatively little dipping into the pocket. Many retail stores will pour samples on certain specified days.