AG: 2016 And 2017 Barbaresco And Point Inflation

Don’t get your point, no pun intended. 2016 is widely regarded as a great vintage in Piedmont. He has given out one 100 point score that I can see, which is not unlike 2013 or 2010. I don’t see point inflation here

The article makes a point about the problem of point inflation.

It’s not AG inflating points. It’s all the newbs out there who just got into these wines and never travel the region. His point is buyer beware of the fly by critic.

“More recently, the wine reviewing world has become populated by tasters who award wines absurdly high scores that those wines have no chance of ever actually living up to.”

is this one of those statements that sounds true, but really cannot be verified because it’s so vague and open-ended?

Got it

“More recently, the wine reviewing world has become populated by tasters who award wines absurdly high scores that those wines have no chance of ever actually living up to.”

is this one of those statements that sounds true, but really cannot be verified because it’s so vague and open-ended?

(ITB)

Or maybe it’s one of those statements that hits just a little too close to home?

Back in the day, when you could still cross paths with legit 96- to 98-point wines in the general vicinity of $150, I felt like I could give valid scores to wines.

But in the last few years, as those wines soared to prices like $1500 or even $15,000, it started to dawn on me that I have no business whatsoever assigning scores to wines anymore, simply because I don’t socialize in them zip codes no mo’.

Ergo I can try to imagine how a 98-point $15,000 Musigny might smell or taste, but it ain’t never gonna get anywhere near muh nostrils [much less actually enter muh mouf].

A little off-topic, but the guys at Cellar Tracker are TOUGH SCORERS.

If you can find a wine there with 20 or 30 unique tasters [and not just two or three guys each posting ten different tasting notes on the same wine], and if those 20 or 30 unique tasters are converging on a score of about 94 points, then you’re dealing with a world-class wine.

The same might be true of Vivino, but Vivino is much more difficult for me to suss out - I don’t have a strong visceral sense of the difference between 4.3 vs 4.5 vs 4.7 vs 4.9 at Vivino.

[And because tards can do Vivino on their tardphone apps, the barrier to entry is much, much lower.]

94 points is a world class wine.

its really true. a wine on CT with several unique tasters thats over a 91 is a very solid wine most times. I’ve also found this really varies by wine region fans too. a 92 point Burgundy on CT will likely be one of the best wines I’ve ever had in my life. a 94 point cali cab… maybe the best wine you have in that two week period.

More thread drift, but I had the same questions about Vivino ratings.
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Your CT note had me thinking… are these barbaresco scores perhaps too high in certain cases? There are many 30-60 buck wines scored 95+. Either those wines are wildly mispriced or the scores are too high?

In my limited experience so far, those scores are too high. But often there are only a few of them, less than 5 for a lot of 2016s, so I take those with a grain of salt.

And what do most CT reviewers actually know about young Barbaresco? If they’re tasting it now it’s probably because they heard a lot about the vintage and came to it with high expectations.

Stock in trade for wine writers!

As for beware of ‘fly by reviewers’, that sounds like simply dissing his competitors …“trust me, I was the annointed one, but was ousted, so now I’m the self-annointed one - follow me loyal sheep!”

Sauternes is probably the best value. Plenty of CT 95-97 wines for 100-200 for a 375.

Indeed, it sounds like a pissy way of saying, “I was here first.”

He was (among critics writing in English), and deep knowledge of a region over a long span is of huge importance, particularly with wines like Barolo and Burgundy that are hard to judge young.

But even in his Piedmont Report days, he had an extremely compressed scale. Pretty much everything was scored 89-94. And I never found his notes very helpful. Worst of all, I’ve never seen him note wines that were distinctly oaky, something many of us nebbiolo lovers want to know. I’ve been dumbfounded on a number of occasions to read his reviews of wines that clobbered you with oak, and all he talked about was the nuances and beams of this or that, and how I shouldn’t miss the wine. (To his credit, he doesn’t seem as profligate with scores over 95 as many other critics.)

So, he is clearly knowledgeable and he’s been following the wines for a long time, but that doesn’t suffice. For my money, I’d rather listen to Walter Fissler, Jancis Robinson’s Piedmont man.

I think sweet wines tend to get high scores. They’re hard not to like. I know I find myself giving lots of points to sweet wines when I’m keeping notes for myself. I wouldn’t base any QPR calculations on those CT scores.

Why not? If you like them that much, aren’t they worth as much as other wines that you like that much? I may be an outlier, but that’s how sauternes ended up being 30% of my cellar…