Wine release tasting notes, do you get fed up with them

After several years and now hundreds of wine release notes its getting pretty obvious that they are nothing more than flowery words. How can every wine ever made and sold by every vineyard be great and better than what they have made before ?

It would be nice if just once somebody would say, yep this years syrah is pretty good but its not as good as last years, the strange thing is that i would be so impressed with the honesty i would buy more from that winery.

You actually read those notes?

Some wineries are pretty candid. Ridge comes to mind. They don’t say, “This year sucks,” but if you’ve read their labels for years, you can tell which bottlings they’re excited about and which they view with more modest expectations.

Mick Unti at Unti in Sonoma did a retrospective of their syrahs and was refreshingly honest about the vintages that hadn’t developed well.

Is this why you bought the Arista?

I don’t really read them

It’s rather like the legalese boilerplate attached to drug and car leasing advertisements, or the latest software or app download. Your job is not to read all that crap, just sign the pretty dotted line and SEND IN YO MONEY!

From the other side, I want to say just trust me. If you have enjoyed my wines, you will enjoy this one. If there were something wrong with it, I would not offer it nor sell it. Now just buy it:)

For your wines, I would go with this tasting note!

The 12’s were fantastic, 13’s wow vintage of the century, 14’s they combine the best of the 12’s & 13’s you cant miss these and the 15’s already this is the vintage of the millenium, 16’s they will be a combo of the 12’s, 13’s & 15’s without the harshness now obvious in the 14,s the 17’s will be far better that the 15’s which did fulfill their barrel promise in the bottle, the 18’s will be next vintage of the century and absolutely unmissable

Thank goodness that’s all behind us now!!!

Nope…don’t agree w/ that, Alan. I think most winemakers (least the ones I buy from) make an honest/sincere effort to describe
each vintage’s wines. They usually make it clear which wine you should back up the truck for. I’m sure there are some pre-release TN’s
that are mostly marketing & hype…but those are not the folks I buy my wine from (sniff/sniff)!
Tom

I totally get that (a) a winemaker is proud of the product of all his efforts, and (b) they’re trying to run a business and to sell what they’ve made. I expect their praise of the wines is usually very sincere, and I respect that.

But yeah, the end result isn’t usually that helpful to the customer. Sometimes, you might be able to find clues to which style you would prefer out of their different offerings (e.g. this zin is more red fruited and higher acid, this other one is really dark and lush), which can be a help when trying to sort through a lot of options from some winery that you already know and like.

I see both positives and negatives to ‘tasting notes’. I never offer true ‘tasting notes’ for my wines, because I don’t believe you should listen to what any one individual has to say about his or her wines. I’m not trying to be ‘snarky’ but the truth is, we all smell and taste differently.

That said, I DO think it’s important to talk about the fermentation process, barrels used, any anomalys that occurred that vintage versus others, info about that specific vineyard. To me, that’s good ‘objective’ information.

I also don’t have an issue of a winemaker making ‘comparative’ statements with previous vintages at all - that tends to make sense.

I am just not a huge fan of ‘descriptive selling’

YMMV

Cheers

I always have my mentor, Jim Gallagher, write the release notes. He likes my house style, and actually co-created it. Jim has more than 50 years of serious wine appreciation in his toolkit. He would tell me if something was amiss.

If I had a winery, I would hire Jon Rimmerman to write my notes. I would likely have to bottle in minimum of double magnums though, as otherwise there wouldn’t be enough label space.

Sorry about Bonk, Merrill. He will be back next year of course.

For me it really depends on the winery and the type of notes. I agree that the “vintage of the century” commentary doesn’t add value. But, for wineries where I’ve experienced multiple vintages, and I do find value in seeing comparisons vintage-over-vintage. For example, maybe the new vintage has more/less tannin/acid/ripeness.

I guess if I thought the person writing the release notes was full of nonsense, I’m not sure I’d buy their wines. If I wouldn’t buy their wines, I’m not sure why I’d be getting their release notes. The wineries I buy from I trust.

I agree with the OP. This is about tasting notes and not winemakers’ opinions of a vintage. 2011 in California comes to mind as no one is shy about the poor quality of the vintage in Sonoma. BUT, tasting notes do not reflect that IMO.

A less good year still captures what happened that year. I believe deeply in “history in a bottle” - so a wine should taste of its year, and its place. Of course, I’d rather buy more in “good” years, and less in bad, but at the end of the day, every bottle has a story.

I think it was Clive Coates who wrote something years ago (lampooning Parker I imagine) basically saying that all one can really conclude on barrel tasting is balance and general style - rather than exact aromatic details that are subject to substantial change as the wine goes from barrel to bottle. I tend to agree.

Because the vintage is not remotely “poor.”