I find there’s almost no way to correlated scores across different wine reviewers. Ideally, you’d like to be able to get a feel over time for who’s palate you most closely identify with to use as your shortcut/guide in allocating your $$$. I am just not there yet, evidently. As an example, 2012 Venge Bone Ash Cab…RP 98 pts, WS 89 - that’s as huge a divergence of opinion as there ever was. If you look for that particular bottle of wine on-line…there’s zero mention anywhere of the WS score (no surprise).
Someone earlier mentioned blind tasting methodology used by Laube - how would you argue AGAINST that as an attempt to eliminate systematic biases based on pre-conceived expectations? I don’t know anyone who’s not influenced by that out here in the real world. In fact, it’s great fun to do blind tastings over dinner with a bunch of wine-o friends.
It’s a complicated thing. I agree that blind tasting is very instructive, and a good way to remove bias. But there is also something to making a connection to the wine, where and how it is produced, getting information from the source about the vintage and factors that produced a certain wine. Ideally, if someone can remain relatively unbiased, I’m not opposed to reviewing wines in that way. The problem is that Parker is clearly unable to do that, and brings a huge bias in to his tastings. If he likes a certain producer, he’s always going to boost that producer’s scores.
Another potential problem with blind tastings is how many wines are on the table, and how many get tasted in a day. I know I need to give my palate many minutes to recover before trying another wine (and even 5 or 10 minutes is probably not enough to fully recover). I suspect that the blind tasting flights are gone through in less time than that. Then pile on multiple flights in a day, and palate fatigue is pretty much guaranteed - particularly with big wines like Cab. When a reviewer tastes any particular wine can make a big difference.
That’s true and it’s why having a single glass to taste through 50 wines is kind of silly. If you taste many wines in a morning and then start again in the afternoon, you can get palate fatigue but that’s never been a problem as far as I’m concerned. It’s like running - you just do it. Of more concern is avoiding making your reference points the near neighbors - what you tasted just before and just after. So you need to have several glasses, or go back and re-taste. It is possible to remember what you tasted 90 minutes ago so you can compare it to what’s in your glass now, but it’s even better to go back and make sure that your memory is correct.
Blind tasting has its drawbacks, as many have mentioned. But tasting with the wine maker or distributor hovering six inches from your face is even worse, particularly if that same person bought you dinner a week earlier or maybe just that afternoon. Of all possible approaches, there is a lot to recommend the WS approach where they taste a glass of a previously-rated wine non-blind to calibrate. It’s not perfect, but again, every method has drawbacks. OTOH, I really can’t find consistency in Laube’s palate.
And that is NOT because he’s tasting blind. If tasting blind means he’s random, then he’s a shitty taster. My wife is 100% consistent. I pour a wine six months or a year after she’s tasted it once and she has exactly the same reaction, using the same words. I’ve poured the same 1993 Roagna Barbaresco years apart and her reaction is always exactly the same - “Ugh. Don’t ever pour this for me again. Let’s open something else.”
If I recall correctly it is perhaps 2 flights a day with 8-12 wines. I might be wrong, that is just off the top of my head.
FWIW, I don’t know of any wine writers, who taste blind or otherwise, that take 5-10 minutes between wines tasted. That’s not a problem unique to blind tasting.
Great example with your wife being consistent on the same wine. I don’t recall many examples of Laube being inconsistent with the same wine, but perhaps I am forgetting things. Do you?
Thanks Adam, two flights of 8-12 wines in a day seems quite reasonable, though I’m surprised it’s that few wines, given how many they taste for a vintage review.
As for just powering through wines, I just can’t agree that you can “train” your palate to be able to taste large numbers of wines. Your taste and smell receptors aren’t muscles you can train, or red blood cell count you can increase to gain more stamina.
Receptors saturate, and take time to recover. Try smelling a corked wine, then 10 seconds later try it again - it will appear to be less corked. Your receptors won’t recover for some time, so proper evaluation of a wine takes time. There is just no way around physiology and biochemistry.
The notion that you can just force yourself to properly evaluate wines after your palate is shot reminds me of the first scene in this clip:
Alan I agree that it’s not about “training” and I’ve always thought it weird when people compare it to an athletic endeavor. But you learn to pick things out. I’m not saying that you make a mental note to yourself that this wine has more cassis than that one, partly for the reasons you mention. But you can note an overall pattern, you notice if the tannins are scrubbing your mouth or if they’re just rather dusty, you notice whether the alcohol feels like an arrow in your throat or if it’s not noticeable at all, etc.
It’s the only way you can make a trip to taste wines at a number of wineries and determine whether you’re interested in working with the winery, or taste through a distributor’s portfolio after you just tasted through a few others and make any kind of decision.
Would you write tasting notes on each wine? I don’t. I write them for myself, to remind me of which I liked and which I didn’t. Then I would taste the former again, more leisurely, to make sure that my initial impressions were correct. Sometimes they aren’t and I wonder what I was thinking, but often they are. And sometimes, even in the middle of a huge mass tasting, a wine is so singular that you recognize again immediately what it was that you liked or disliked the first time.
Do you “properly” evaluate a wine when tasting fairly rapidly, like only a few minutes per wine? Depends on what the definition of “proper” is. I think you can taste a number of wines and fairly rank them against each other. That is the point of the WS approach when they taste a non-blind wine of a known score. Can you pick up all the things that people like to write in long tasting notes? Probably not, and the WS tasting notes are usually not more than two or three lines. OTOH some people can spend a lot of time with a wine and not get a lot of useful information.
Adam - I haven’t examined a lot of his scores, but Viader for example, was a darling of the WS in the mid 1990s and now scores 89 - 91 points most times. The wine hasn’t changed all that much to my taste. And he scored the 1993 89 and said the 1994 was the best ever at 93 points, then at a different tasting scored the 1993 93 points too. I assume that was because he had started scoring them higher in general, before getting a little tired of them.
I have no beef with Laube though. Or really any of the WS critics for that matter. I think they try to do their best.
While I see 8-12 wines in one day reasonable though I have done 25 in a day when tasting and spitting, I’m not sure how fair it is to compare wines tasted one day with wines tasted the next day. There can be so many variables from day to day. What did you eat that day? Did you have nasal congestion one day, etc.?
