In a head-scratching moment this past Wednesday, the Michelin Guide announced that it will soon begin rating wines. As best I can tell, this wasn’t part of an official press release, but instead emerged from commentary made by executives presenting at a general press event about the Guide.

Given that Michelin already owns and publishes Robert Parker’s Wine Advocate, the announcement is slightly befuddling. According to reports from the press event, few details were shared about when and how this new initiative will roll out.

But, in a telling moment, when asked what this meant for the Wine Advocate, Michelin’s CEO Florent Menegaux was quoted as saying, “The Michelin brand is much more powerful,” while also making clear that the Wine Advocate brand would continue to exist.

From a pure brand awareness standpoint, Menegaux isn’t wrong. Far more people know what a Michelin star means than have heard of a wine critic named Robert M. Parker, Jr. or his publication.

If Michelin wants to become a source of authority on wine for the millions of global customers who rely on the brand for restaurant (and more recently, hotel) recommendations, it has a simple choice to make. Michelin can either pour money into making the Wine Advocate a globally recognized brand, or it can use its existing platform to deliver wine ratings.

Purely from a marketing spend perspective, only one of those things makes sense—and when you factor in brand awareness, the smart move would be to stick with Michelin.

I’m quite curious, however, how they plan to pull this off. For starters, will they be repurposing the decades’ worth of content in the Wine Advocate archives and the reams of wine ratings the publication continues to produce every quarter? If so, it’s hard to see how they won’t be undermining the value of the asset they purchased in 2019—especially if, like their restaurant and hotel reviews, they plan to offer wine reviews for free.

If they’re not planning to leverage the content engine that is the Wine Advocate, well then, they’ve got a hell of a lot of work ahead of them just to make a dent in the hundreds of thousands of global wines that could conceivably be good enough for a Michelin wine rating. Will they assemble a global network of wine reviewers the same way they have for hotels and restaurants? Will anonymous reviews satisfy their customer base?

Will the guide rate wines on a three-point scale, the same way they do for hotels and restaurants? If Domaine de la Romanée-Conti Échezeaux gets three stars, what does Littorai Havens Vineyard Pinot Noir get? Will your favorite $20 Provence rosé earn the wine equivalent of a Bib Gourmand? Michelin famously reimburses the meal and hotel expenses of their reviewers. But forgetting for a moment that tasting the full lineup of Domaine Leroy in Burgundy would cost more than $20,000 if you were actually buying the bottles—how are their anonymous reviewers supposed to get their hands on such wines and still remain anonymous?

Will these reviewers be rating wines, or will they take the unusual step of rating wineries themselves? What factors would those ratings be based on, beyond the wines themselves? And will a winery lose its rating when its winemaker moves on, even though the wines they made will continue to be sold for years?

In case you weren’t aware, one of Michelin’s main sources of revenue these days (far more than their printed guides) comes from getting paid by cities and regions around the world to publish ratings for their establishments—as well as the commissions they receive for booking reservations at many of those places.

How’s that gonna work in the world of wine, exactly? Are the Napa Valley Vintners going to fork over big money to Michelin to make sure that their wines are well represented in the guide? Is the Guide going to expect to offer (and profit from) booking services for wine tastings the way they do today with restaurant and hotel reservations?

I guess it’s too bad for Michelin that Gambero Rosso long ago trademarked their Tre Bicchieri (three glasses) named rating system, because that would have fit right in with Michelin’s three restaurant stars and three hotel keys. Maybe it’s going to have to become the coveted Michelin Three Bottle rating, eh? Bottles are better than glasses anyway, right?

All joking and rampant speculation aside, this will be a very interesting brand extension to watch for a number of reasons. Sticking to wine industry concerns for a moment, there has never been a central place for average wine consumers to go for wine recommendations and criticism. Every existing publication and platform—from Wine Spectator to the Wine Advocate to Jancis Robinson’s website—has carved out only a small niche of wine-interested readership. Wine Spectator, the largest of these, with a claimed readership of “more than 2 million,” still speaks to only a small fraction of the Michelin Guide’s global reach, which I would estimate to be in the scores of millions per year (based on their claims of 9 million unique digital visitors per month)

Over the last 20 years, the wine industry has proven quite definitively that we can’t grow the audience of wine lovers much larger—we can only carve it into smaller and smaller pieces. From that perspective, tacking on a wine offering to a much bigger food-and-travel-focused audience doesn’t sound like a poor strategy.

As with great cooking, the devil is in the details. Will this be the expansion of an empire, or an ill-considered overreach?