I have no quarrel with sweet wines. I own a lot of late harvest riesling. But I think the idea of some mathematical calculation of value based on CT scores (basically, points per dollar) is just silly.
The Truth hurts, but I LOL’ed.
John, just for correction, it’s Walter Speller… ![[thumbs-up.gif]](/uploads/db3686/original/2X/f/f84c5acc11486ee4baba6dee6cf61dbd133abb18.gif "[thumbs-up.gif]"){kind=small}
I agree that he seems a useful source of info. I like that he tastes a bunch of the wines blind, and often again at the domaine. I feel this provides a reliable judgement. He also does call out oak/élevage notes when he comes across them.
John 8:7
I would value collective judgement. I think there is worth in group thinking, if you remove the outliers than can distort results.
Oops. My bad.
Collective judgment of people who may know little about tasting wines that are hard to evaluate young? ![[scratch.gif]](/uploads/db3686/original/2X/4/42a16863a8714da3c1604419e3eb9206bb87aa50.gif "scratch"){kind=small}
I believe most folks posting on CT have some acquaintance with wine, and unless there is some idiot who always posts “93” on wines, I think the scores there can be parsed to get a fairly accurate reading of a wine. When you take out the outliers (for instance, the Cali Cab drinker giving a “65” to a Jura poulsard), you get even better results. I feel it’s the same way I read critics. Examine the trigger words (these are individual to everyone) and either discount them or give them weight to adjust to your palate. Obviously if someone merely posts a score with no context, that would not get used.
I’ve been in a number of blind tasting groups for years, and when tasting serious young wines on release, the tendency is for people to give the highest scores to the most approachable ones. Relatively few people have tasted wines young and followed them over decades and have a sense for when a wine has great potential but is very young and tight. I think that’s particularly an issue with Burgundy and nebbiolo-based wines, but also with cabs in many cases. That’s why so much winemaking these days is aimed at making wines that are easy to drink out of the gate, even if that means sacrificing depth and longevity.
Add to that the fact that most CT posters are not tasting blind, and there are lots of reasons to discount those scores of very young wines.
I’ve tried using Vivino a few times especially when buying $15-20 wines and most times I’ve been disappointed. 4.0 wines that sounds like solid wines in the comment section turns out to lack any depth and complexity instead they are hiding behind a lot of oak, vanilla and sweetness.
For some times now I’ve been using an average of Wine Spectator and James Suckling scores as pointers on what to expect of a wine. WS can be low with their scores and JS is the king of inflating points.
So if WS gave a wine 91 and JS gave the same wine 96 I’d assume it is a 93 point wine. It’s not always accurate but it works as a good pointer.
If its an Italian wine I look up and there’s no WS rating and only a JS rating I subtract 5-7 points from what JS gave. I participated in a tasting hosted by a tuscan winery which WS gave a low 90s rating while JS gave it an almost perfect 100. I’m a big fan of Italian wines but I don’t think its just Barbaresco that “suffer” from point inflation.
Another interesting thread - and AG’s sentiments could certainly be echoed by every ‘professional’ reviewer out there. I understand where he is coming from - but this doesn’t kind of sound a little ‘sour grapes’ to me, no?
At the end of the day, are wines being made ‘better’ and ‘more consistent’ than ever, therefore ‘objectively deserving’ higher scores? I mean, AG has definitely offered higher scores than he did in the past, maybe not necessarily with Italian wines but certainly with domestic ones.
Cheers.
Yeah, you mis-spelled it.