Great info! Up until now I thought the main critics were Parker, Suckling and Galloni.
My curiosity or interest rarely is piqued by the numerical value placed upon a tasting experience. Having said that, I have no problem with someone’s flights of creative language in describing a sip of wine.
I appreciate the descriptive phrases printed by individuals like the Prince of Pinot, GrapeNutz folks TomHill and Ken Zinns, the various writers at Wine and Spirits, Tim Fish @ the Wine Spectator, most of what I read here, the Gang of Pour, and Hawk Waka Wine’s Ms Elaine Chukan Brown. I am sure that I have neglected to mention the specific Cellar Tracker tasters who I follow as well as a handful of bloggers…
but it is nice to not have to taste every wine you might want to try to figure out if it’s worth buying.
But Doug old buddy - is there really any other way to figure out if a wine is worth buying? Wouldn’t you rather taste a bunch of wines and decide which of those you like rather than wait for someone to opine on it?
Has never registered here but I still like Charlie Olken and Connoisseurs Guide to California Wine. All blind tasted except for retrospective tastings.
Isn’t that impractical for 99.9% of wine drinkers though?
If this is true of wine critics, it is the only kind of criticism it is true of. Great critics of literature, film, art, etc. always do have distinctive points of view and virtually always make some judgments that are considered anomalous by other critics. They are great precisely because their point of view leads them to find what makes the work of art a valuable experience, not what will make it appeal to the largest number of people.
Now since I have always maintained that wine isn’t art, it may be that wine criticism is different, but, really, if you want enlightenment rather than merely buying guidance (and for that, no one critic will ever be reliable, I think), you want a critic to have a point of view.
It seems to me that the fallacy of ‘objectively’ scoring wine (which I sense is at the root of this discussion) arises out of the conflation of two types of tasting.
One is technical tasting, which assesses wines against a variety of criteria to determine success or failure; and it gives binary results: the wine is flawed or not, balanced or not, its tannins are ripe or not, etc. This is the sort of tasting that enologists, winemakers, appellation officials, etc do professionally.
Technical tasting gets mixed up with what we might call appreciative tasting, which results in much more fun and enthusing tasting notes, but is unavoidably concerned with personal preference. You can attempt to quantify preference, sure, but you are not going to be producing a number that is in any sense objective.
In practice, critics’ scores are often an amalgam of how much they themselves like the wine, and how much they think their readers are likely to like the wine.
I want all critics and posters to have an opinion. The stronger the better. It is their personal opinion that sets them apart and lets you know where they stand, pro or con. The personal point of view is what separates the value of each tasters comments. Their point of view needs to remain consistent, so you know what to expect from wines they like or not.
Absolutely. If I could, I’d taste a lot of wines across vintages from several Burgundy domaines that I see posted about here frequently, then decide which of those I’d like to have in my cellar. In many cases, I can’t try those wines without buying them, though, and trying them with any meaningful age on them is either prohibitively expensive or nearly impossible. Even with current releases, I can’t reasonably try every Burgundy I might want to buy. And I’m in the business, with access to some pretty good trade tastings in my area. It’s even more difficult for a lot of other people. I use Burgundy as an example because it’s the most relevant to me (high level of interest with little opportunity to taste a lot of the smaller production wines, let alone allocated wines), but I could say the same thing to a lesser extent about a lot of other categories.
Not Suckling.
Where are you going to taste all these wines, especially upper level wines?
And, even if you could taste all those wines, what about mailing list wines that are allocated, necessitating your need to buy before you try? What about Bordeaux futures? Old and rare wines? Most people will never have the chance to buy before they try a vast array of wines, that is where notes and scores from critics and some tasters come in handy.
Do you ever read book reviews, movie reviews or product reviews to help you decide what to read, watch and buy? Or do you just read, watch and buy everything so you can form your own 100% certain opinion? Do you just go dine at every restaurant so you can decide if it’s good on not, or do you sometimes read reviews or Yelp to help you pick one?
There is this false choice suggested that you either surrender your will to the points critics give out, or you try things and decide for yourself. Nearly everyone is in between those things - they try things when they are able (but don’t have the luxury of getting to try everything or most things before they commit to purchases), they listen to recommendations from critics, friends and other sources, they learn to play the odds based on producers, regions, vintages, varieties and other information. Critics and, gasp, scores can be one part of that overall information, and there’s nothing inherently wrong with that.
James Suckling is not the best writer… But at least for Bordeaux, he is a very good taster. He is consistent, the first to release his notes and regardless of his overall score being a bit high, (at least to me) he finds the better wines. He also tastes wines on all price levels, so he is a good source of info for Bordeaux. I do not follow the other regions he covers.
Maybe. But I do.
He is indeed; every wine 95 points and higher. He has become a joke to me
I agree. It is one reason why I read what you write even though your palate and mine are not at all aligned. I don’t have to guess where you are coming from.
Does doesn’t “I’m 95 on that” make him a very good wine scorer? Certainly better than Gilman - he has much lower scores.
I respect people who are knowledgeable and lots of different categories of wines. Greg Tatar is the best exemplar of that I know.
That said, that’s not what I want in a critic. I want someone who shares many of my leanings/preferences/prejudices but can open my eyes to things I might not have tried. If they like all types of wine and I don’t, they aren’t much use to me.
That doesn’t mean they won’t open my eyes to new possibilities. Greg dal Piaz did that when he worked at Astor, recommending some great things from California, even though that wasn’t his greatest love or an area that I was following much. But I trusted his recos and I was right.
In the 80s and early 90s, I found Parker very useful because my preferences correlated with his, even when I was tasting blindly. Not so much as time went by, and now I find almost a negative correlation. Galloni’s scores all fall in a narrow band, so I don’t find they differentiate wines for me. Suckling is a joke. Gilman is useful to me, but he leans a little far over on the high-acid side for my palate, so I take his suggestions with a grain of salt.
Right now I’m more inclined to listen to friends I taste with or the people here on WB who lean toward the things I do. I guess that’s what Robert Alfert was doing when he tasted that 2005 La Rioja Alta Gran Reserva that he posted on. He turned to me and Keith Levenberg, and I told him Greg T liked it, too.
+1
FWIW I’d rather read tasting notes from someone who has something interesting to say. That may indeed be someone whose palate doesn’t align to mine particularly well. However people’s palates appear to have their own complexity - sometimes it surprises me that someone likes something that I didn’t think was their ‘thing’. Indeed sometimes I surprise myself in liking something I didn’t expect to like!
I always enjoy reading TomHill’s posts, especially the wee bloody pulpit part. His posts are a great example of wine as a talking point, rather than a scoring point. I’d much rather read about someone’s experience with a wine, rather than a debate about what score should be attributed to a wine. Let the critics squabble over the points - They need them to sell their name / position themselves on shelf-talkers / make it ‘easy’ for newcomers and hence sell their books / subscriptions. I’d much rather read what folks thought of the wine, whether that be a more traditional tasting note, something more exuberant (David Strange, take a bow), or just express anger, frustration, satisfaction or joy.
… and I know this place can be intimidating, but please don’t be intimidated out of posting your thoughts on the wines you drink. Such thoughts are the lifeblood of any wine forum.
regards
Ian
I would never go to a film based on one review–even of a review I know and trust. I read a range of reviews, get a sense of what the movie is, and then decide whether to go or not. I will go to a movie I might not be prima facie interested in, if a review catches my interest. But a movie is really a very small investment, so I do go to a lot of them. And I read many more books. An author I know, I review that catches my interest, the recommendation of a friend whose tastes I know, almost anything will get me to read a book. But the reviewers I follow, I do so because I like their writing and their thinking about films or movies, not because I necessarily will follow their opinion.