Best review site

[Paul_McCourt]

I rarely read “reviews” of specific wines. I like to read vintage reports from different sources and more generalized reports, but reviews of particular wines doesn’t interest me much anymore. I do enjoy reading some people’s thoughts here on certain wines, and have tried some wines based on that.

[John_Glas]

Cellar Tracker works great for me.

[Kris_Patten]

It would be great to see a compendium of all sub $25 or $30 wines from review teams regions quarterly or bi-yearly, many seem to think, and I may be incorrect, that it devalues their publication having a report of 85-91 point wines.

Wine Spectator, Wine Enthusiast, and Wine and Spirits do this regularly. And WS does it every time they do a review of an entire region, which is every issue, breaking their list down into “best values” and “top wines”. If you understand the specific reviewer’s palate one way or another, you’re good.

But as a retailer, you would never put “85 Points!!!” on a shelf-talker or an e-mail blast. It’s very easy to find a 90+ point from one of the hundreds of reviewers and crowd sites. For people who buy from retail citations, it makes no difference at all who the points are from.

In grocery an 87 or 88 point & best buy on a $6.99 wine moves wine. No one expects a 90 on something at that price. Agree on 85, but that used to be an okay wine, now it’s a 6-10 point scale, depending on reviewer.

[Hank_Victor]

I’ll nominate jancisrobinson.com as a dark horse.

[Nathan_Smyth]

I’ll nominate jancisrobinson.com as a dark horse.

Decanter has this new industry bash/fair/May-day-celebration thingamabob [possibly involving druidism?] wherein producers submit their wines for evaluation and everyone gets a score of “97”.

I haven’t yet figured out whether it’s supposed to be serious, or if it’s an insiders-joke and they’re just laughing at the general public.

[Eric_LeVine]

Vivino is the 800lb Gorilla sitting over in the corner of the room.

Somehow they materialized out of nowhere [at least from my vantage point], and now they dominate the marketplace.

I use a mix of Berserker searches, Cellar Tracker, Vivino, and Free Wine-Searcher [for price comparison].

I’m very fortunate, though, in that I often get to taste the wines before making a purchase.

Although, even there, I’ll buy just one bottle of a wine which I enjoyed tasting, and then bring that one bottle back home, and watch its oxidation curve for about a week, before committing to a full case purchase.

8 years and 54.5 million dollars invested is not materializing out of nowhere. Their announced plan is to sell 1 billion dollars of wine by 2020.

[Nathan_Smyth]

Vivino is the 800lb Gorilla sitting over in the corner of the room.

Somehow they materialized out of nowhere [at least from my vantage point], and now they dominate the marketplace.

I use a mix of Berserker searches, Cellar Tracker, Vivino, and Free Wine-Searcher [for price comparison].

I’m very fortunate, though, in that I often get to taste the wines before making a purchase.

Although, even there, I’ll buy just one bottle of a wine which I enjoyed tasting, and then bring that one bottle back home, and watch its oxidation curve for about a week, before committing to a full case purchase.

8 years and 54.5 million dollars invested is not materializing out of nowhere. Their announced plan is to sell 1 billion dollars of wine by 2020.

I had no idea they were backed by the big $$$s - nor that they’d been around for that long.

I had never heard of them, until maybe six or eight months ago, when I stumbled upon their website, and noticed out of the corner of my eye that they were claiming to have [on the order of] tens of thousands of tasting notes per wine.

Have they had an advertising budget [Radio/TV/Print/Internet] for the last eight years?

Because if they were advertising all this time, then either I wasn’t in their target audience, or else I’m good enough now at ignoring advertising that I never noticed any of their ads.

[Marcus_Goodfellow]

This is a great call out- easy to find reviews on the big names, well established names, and ultra expensive flashy newcomers, many of which are sold out by the time the score is published, but the value or under the radar wines you have to het via word of mouth.

I would agree that wine criticism as a whole could do with more discovery and less validation-of-the-unobtainable, but I don’t think it’s entirely like that. I’m just writing up some 500 reviews of Beaujolais wines, for example, and Josh Reynold at Vinous does a large and excellent annual Beaujolais report, too. I have 300 reviews of wines from the Côte Chalonnaise and less heralded villages of the Côte de Beaune coming out in a few days, including several producers never reviewed in English before. John Gilman’s annual Loire report is always a value treasure trove. It would be easy to go on, and on non-partisan lines.

I don’t disagree William, except the fact that Beaujolais, Cote Chalonnaise, and Loire tend to be dominated by wines under $30, many under $20. Same with Chianti/Classico, Fronsac, and other regions, whereas finding many sub-$25 Pinot Noirs in Oregon is near impossible.

It would be great to see a compendium of all sub $25 or $30 wines from review teams regions quarterly or bi-yearly, many seem to think, and I may be incorrect, that it devalues their publication having a report of 85-91 point wines.

This is a good series of posts.

In Vinous recent publication of Josh Reynolds Oregon reviews, the post are ordered by score, and among wines of the same score they are ordered by price with the most expensive listed first even though those should be the least value(among wines of the same score). It seems odd to me to bury the best values and highlight the producers most likely to be ego-driven vanity projects, or simply have bought their way into good wines through expensive Burgundian consultants, high cost fruit contracts, and a money is no object approach…an unfortunate occurrence in the Willamette Valley ever since Mark Tarlov showed up here(to quote Zinedine Zidane, “We hope he leaves soon. It would be best for everyone.”)

For the OP:
These boards are a great resource for all of the information you seek. Vinous is solid but Josh ran far enough behind in publishing the reviews that many of the wines are gone(I don’t think this is typical). Josh is an excellent reviewer, as are most of the other writers.

I also feel the WA is still doing a good job of covering Oregon(although the rate at which the number of Oregon wineries is growing is hard to keep up with). I really hope we can keep the same reviewer for the next decade.

That said, there is a TON of great information here and plenty of regular posters who are tremendous resources for almost any region you could hope to gain insight into.

Word of mouth Willamette Valley Pinot Noirs sub-$25:

Cameron WV
Evesham Wood WV
Patricia Green Reserve
Goodfellow WV (I make this)
Also try Biggio-Hamina

[markjchambers]

Thanks for all of the responses. I agree about the sub-$25 recs. Parker used to do a value list. As OP, I look for three things in a review sites. 1) discovering new wines, especially good value wines. I would peruse the under $25 list and often found wines that became staples. 2) Finding the best bang for the buck, especially wine that is not exactly main stream. For example, I found good albarino (Pazo Senorans) and gewurz (Cantina Terlano), both very reasonably priced, by searching on WA. I’m not sure I would have found them otherwise. My favorite K Vintners syrah is Cattle King. I would not have know that it even existed if not for the WA review. And 3) Early scores on wines that I subscribe to. I used to blindly order my full allocation just to stay on the list, but I really can’t afford to do that any more. If I’m spending $100-$200 a bottle and the scores drop significantly, I’m likely not to buy. I have been thrown off a few lists for that reason, but I have no regrets. There is a lot of good wine out there.

That all assumes that I’m in sync with the reviewer(s) and I was for a long time with WA.

I agree that CT and WB are great resources. I am relatively new to WB but I will certainly avail myself.

[Nathan_Smyth]

3. Early scores

That’s my point above here, especially regarding Europe.

In the old days, the pay-to-play operations [WA, WS, IWC, Burghound, Kolms, etc] had upwards of a six month lead-time advantage over the USA-based retail channel [where a pay-to-play guy visiting Europe could taste a bottled wine, ready for shipping, in June of a year, which wouldn’t hit the USA retail channel until maybe December of that year].

But with Vivino & Cellar Tracker having thousands of contributors on the ground in Europe, VV & CT will be publishing retail notes from Europe by, say, August or September of that year, and if you’re a pay-to-play guy trying to sell a “Best Buy” rating in December, then you’re peddling stinky old rotten cabbage - the fresh sweet action was months earlier than you.


EDIT: On the other hand, Pay-to-Play might not be the business model anymore. It could be that paid tastings & cruises & glorified travel agency stuff might be where the dollars are now [in which case the tasting notes simply serve to offer a veneer of respectability to the operation].

[dsimmons]

I use WA and Cellar Tracker plus the reviews provided by internet retailers. Lots of reviews available free. The trick is discovering how to gauge a reviewer to your palate.

[Marcus_Goodfellow]

You guys who are curious about $15 or $20 wines really need to head on over to Vivino.

Vivino has a monopoly on that market, with sample sizes which dwarf Cellar Tracker’s.

You go to Cellar Tracker for the long-winded commentary on the obscure AFWE wines that only us crazy people are aware of; you go to Vivino for what’s actually sitting on skid-row/low-brow/middle-brow store shelves.

But then I am getting skid-row/low-brow/middle-brow wines…

The non-descript middle tier and it’s ilk, don’t hold much interest for me. I am on the boards because I want to know what the well crafted sub-$25 wines are, and I am guessing that holds true for most WBers.

[Marcus_Goodfellow]

Thanks for all of the responses. I agree about the sub-$25 recs. Parker used to do a value list. As OP, I look for three things in a review sites. 1) discovering new wines, especially good value wines. I would peruse the under $25 list and often found wines that became staples. 2) Finding the best bang for the buck, especially wine that is not exactly main stream. For example, I found good albarino (Pazo Senorans) and gewurz (Cantina Terlano), both very reasonably priced, by searching on WA. I’m not sure I would have found them otherwise. My favorite K Vintners syrah is Cattle King. I would not have know that it even existed if not for the WA review. And 3) Early scores on wines that I subscribe to. I used to blindly order my full allocation just to stay on the list, but I really can’t afford to do that any more. If I’m spending $100-$200 a bottle and the scores drop significantly, I’m likely not to buy. I have been thrown off a few lists for that reason, but I have no regrets. There is a lot of good wine out there.

That all assumes that I’m in sync with the reviewer(s) and I was for a long time with WA.

I agree that CT and WB are great resources. I am relatively new to WB but I will certainly avail myself.

Not to push you away from scores, but you might consider adding relationships with a few retailers. In Oregon, Vinopolis, The Cellar Door, Sec, and Avalon are all great resources for the things you listed above.

[Todd_Hamina]

WE has such inflated scores (and if you are a producer you pay to get your label shown) that their numbers, and publication, are meaningless.