From a Garagiste E-Mail today offering of the 2011 Chateau du Glana Saint-Julien Grand Vin 750ml. I haven’t seen Rimmerman nor any other retailer quote 79 point ratings. He usually offers glowing praise from some unknown Cellar Tracker reviewer on wines like this.
WA (Parker, 2012): “This small estate can offer good value, but the 2011 is a superficial, one-dimensional, fruity, early maturing wine with adequate color and richness. While pleasant, it is hardly worth making a special effort to find. 79pts”
Not exactly glowing praise that would make anyone want to buy and at $18.74 I don’t think I will either.
2011 Lagier Meredith Mondeuse. Parker panned it, wonderful wine. This is the one Parker 70-something that I remember buying because he scored it that low. There may have been others given his lack of love for ESJ.
I remember early in Tercero’s run, they got a batch of low scores from one issue of WA, like low and mid 80s kind of stuff, and Larry cheerfully spun it into a promotion of some sort for the wines, which of course were quite good.
I wonder what his takeaway from that experience was, after the dust settled.
Back in the day, eVineyard.com used to list all the scores. Based out of Portland Oregon, they carried a huge range of OR wines, including from many mom-n-pop operations all over the state. Think being able to buy Marechal Foch bottlings from twenty or so producers and the wonderful scores those would garner…
Of course they carried quite a few excellent wines and obviously did well enough. When wine.com failed, they bought the name and moved down to California.
Funny the score/reviewer bias that exists…2011 after 2008/09/10 in Bordeaux had no hope of good Parker scores since it isn’t rich and hedonistic.
Most on here say they hate Parker scores in BDX and avoid wines like Cos d’Estournel, etc…that get high Parker scores. There are decent reviews from Hachette, Enthusiast, Spectator, and even Panos on Cellartracker.
Kutch got panned one year too. Like Tercero I’m sure it didn’t stop fans from buying, but I bet there is always hope that new vintages with good scores will attract new customers. From that perspective I’m sure it’s pretty deflating.
Back when I got those Garagiste emails, I remember him spinning a low score like that once in a while, like a sort of reverse psychology, or ‘just look at how wrong they got it!’ I got tired of his rhetorical style after a year or two
I think it’s pretty funny - and perhaps Garagiste is looking at their core customer base, noting as other’s have said that ‘if Parker panned it, I gotta try it’ . . .
What was your takeaway from your experience with that one batch of low scores? I recall you had good humor about it and made it into a promotion of some sort.
Important context here is that he also quoted 3 other reviews, 2 of which had 90 point scores. When I got the email, I immediately read it as a jab to RP.
Brings back memories of the 01 Montelena Cab that Laube scored 69.It certainly wasn’t a stellar rendition, but I had a 6pack over a decade that was good to very good.
I remember that - he picked up minute amounts of TCA, which were confirmed by a lab, and the winery dug out new caves because of it. He is so hyper sensitive to TCA, but most others that tried the wines did not experience much if anything. Fascinating IMHO.
I’ve seen that in West Coast costco’s for like $22ish, so someone must be stuck with a pile of it out west. Du Glana isn’t all that available here, so even though it may not be an awesome vintage, if one wanted to try all the obscure St Juliens there might some value in nibbling on Rimmerman’s 79 pts.
He did that for BV’s GdL an the Tapestry as well. Gave the Georges 69 points because of the TCA issue, which supposedly they told him about. About a year later I was at a tasting in NYC and there were two women pouring the BV wines. I asked them about it and they said the whole place was livid because they though it was unfair for him to score the wines like that when they’d already known of the TCA and had been working on it way before his piece came out. They said that for the tasting they were going to have t-shirts made with a big 69 printed front and back, but then they thought about it for a little while and decided not to.
I was at a dinner where two 2001 Montelena’s were tasted: one was a lovely, bold Napa cab; the other was shit, clearly tainted by TCA. To put into context, I’m not particularly sensitive to TCA (actually, fairly insensitive to it) nor particularly bothered by it. However, any wine that has basically a 50/50 chance of being crap deserves a crap score.
I find it ironic that everyone is focusing on the score of this wine and ignoring the tasting note: “…superficial, one-dimensional, fruity, early maturing…” Mmm, yummy. That one of the descriptors is “fruity” – and yet scored low – should indicate that people who don’t like “Parkerized” wines probably won’t like it either. Parker scored the 2012 at 87, with similar descriptors (with a maturity of 7-8 years). So how crappy must the 2011 have been. Buy a Beaujolais instead: $19 should land a decent one.