Same goes for me, Neal.
OTOH, all the tasting staff WS have a preference for the rich and round. That was not always so, but I can understand how tastes converge for a group. Wes is right that having dissident opinions on wines within the content of the magazine would confuse and confound the readership. It would deeply undercut the notion that there is a standard for wine appreciation that can be reduced to a numerical score.
P Hickner
2001 Chateau Montelena: Tanzer-93+, Parker-91+, Laube-69. Yeah, he really had a feel for 2001 Napa Cabernet!
Laube detected TCA in the Montelena, and I think he was correct.
Strange how he has such a low threshold for TCA, yet ignores screaming incidence of VA.
P Hickner
The bottles he had tested that showed any taint were all at or below 1.7 ppt. I would think such low levels are imperceivable to most people and would only be realized by a bottle being stripped of fruit.
I don’t care about Laube, but most of this thread makes as much sense as my Saxum/Aubert/Scarecrow crowd rating 20 year old GC Burgs. People who don’t like fruit and power will not like his assessments. That’s OK. Chacun a son gout.
My only objection is to the use of the word “should.” Suggesting that old Cali wine “should” taste a particular way is inappropriate and, besides that, he may know how it “should” taste (assuming that there is a “should”) but not like it. I know how Retsina should taste, and I will still give it 55 points.
Wine Spectator? People actually still read that rag? I dropped that one years ago because their ratings never matched my pallet!
As you are probably aware, this is most often due to a lessening or loss of sense of smell. This is a quite common condition unfortunately for the elderly. My mom lost her sense of smell almost entirely and sweet and salty was about all she could taste at the end.
There is another possibility for Laube and Parker besides “as they got older, their palates dulled and they needed bigger and riper wines.”
I think, consciously or subconsciously, they realize that the large majority of their audience prefers big, dark, ripe, concentrated, lush wines. We all know that is the reality overall, whether we want to admit it or not, and notwithstanding that there are niches like here where the opposite style is more popular, and certain wineries in opposite styles which are doing well.
In other words, Parker and Laube are recommending that style of wine because most of their readers like that style. It’s not that most of their readers like that style because Parker and Laube recommend it.
Do you really believe, being as honest with yourself as you can, that if Parker and Laube had been championing old school and AFWE producers all along and giving low scores to big and ripe modern wines, it would be acidic 12.5% alcohol wines with no new oak that would be selling like Apothic, Prisoner, KB, Rombauer chard, Meiomi, etc., and big modern wines would be the small niche-type product? Would you go to your neighbors’ house for a cookout and they’re all raving about how they just discovered Ceritas chardonnay, Mayacamas Cabernet and Wind Gap Syrah and can’t get enough of it, then some oddball brings over a Rombauer chardonnay and they all turn up their nose at it for being too lush and ripe?
On some level, those guys know their audience. Pointing their readers to wines they will like is good business, and it’s what most of their customers want them to do.
FIFY
The ‘Tasted three times, with consistent notes’ isn’t clearly/obviously explained by the WS folks. It doesn’t mean 3 different bottles were tasted, or 3 different people tasted it or anything like that. It means the reviewer went back to the tasting table 3 times to taste the same bottle and had consistent notes. Worthwhile to know it didn’t change with air, course it’d be nice to know the length of time between the 3 tastes. It’s not an assurance about bottle variation, a comparison of how the wine has performed since the last tasting or other interpretations.
My recollection of their tasting procedure is bottles are opened a half hour ahead (maybe it’s an hour?), a small glass is poured and tasted for major flaws (tca, major VA, etc). If there are any major flaws the backup bottle is opened. Otherwise the backup bottle doesn’t participate in the reviews.
I agree Laube can’t be faulted/blamed for his preferences/limitations/whatever…but Shanken can. But they’re in biz for the majority of the wine drinking public, not us.
“Tasted X times, with consistent results,” means they did the reveal after a blind tasting, thought the result was substantially outside the range of what they would have expected for that wine, so they retasted it one or two more times in other blind flights.
Afterwards, they indicate that their review of the other bottles was roughly the same, or they indicate that the score and review were for “the best out of three bottles” or something.
It’s not a bad methodology, in my opinion.
Opened and decanted a 2001 Montelena Estate this evening and let sit for an hour. No perceivable indication of TCA and the fruit is what I would expect from a 15 year old Montelena. Delicious wine.
I agree that Laube’s preferences get in the way of offering fair assessments of many wines, but there’s no question about those Montelenas having TCA.
Because he could detect it, I think Laube should have pointed it out and rated the wines accordingly. Maybe that '01 could have been far better without it, even for people who can’t detect it.
Under 1.7 ppt.
It’s my understanding that they retaste the bottle from that flight…and if it shows consistently with the initial tasting (and there aren’t any flaws that were missed) they go with that. The subsequent tastings of that bottle aren’t blind, but since it’s to confirm/denying the validity of the initial tasting, rather than scoring, it’s ok. If there’s still a question after that, they might place the second bottle in another tasting (tho not exactly sure what they do in this circumstance). However, they only receive 2 bottles of each wine…if the first bottle opened is corked they won’t have any remaining bottles to place in a future tasting. Also, they group wines by vintage/region/variety, so another tasting might not occur.
Regardless how you feel about Laube’s ratings do not forget that for about 25 or 30 years, he’s made good money drinking a lot wine (for free) that many of us can’t afford or get our hands on. Imagine having to go to work knowing you are going to have to blind taste 30 wines, take some notes and write about it later. Where do I apply.
First, Laube thought very highly of the 2001 vintage both on release and on re-tasting.
Second, he explained why he rated some wines so poorly. It was not because he opened a bottle and it was crap. It was because he had planned to do so to bring attention to the TCA problem at a few wineries, most famously Beaulieu Vineyards. It was something he had been stewing over for at least five years and he made that clear when he released those scores. As you no doubt remember from his comments at the time and the responses from the wineries at the time, he felt that they had repeatedly ignored the issue, whereas they felt that they were addressing it.
I happened to talk to a number of people from BV at the time and they were very upset because they felt that they had been very forthright in acknowledging the problem prior to Laube’s “announcement” and felt that he was unfairly claiming credit for uncovering something that was not covered.
The TCA problems obviously had nothing to do with the vintage, which probably would have been scored higher if not for the pent-up frustration over TCA.
I’ve had a number of 2001 wines from both wineries that I was able to pick up really cheaply because of Laube, so I’m grateful to him. Only one or two were corked, most were just fine.
People can detect TCA at parts per trillion, even under 1.5 ppt. People’s ability to detect it varies considerably, but apparently Laube is one of the sensitive types.
It wasn’t just BV or Montelena - for example, Laube told Hanzell that they had a TCA problem as well. They said that they had heard no complaints from anyone but just to be sure, they had 25 samples tested from their 2000 Chardonnay and 2001 Pinot Noir. Those results indeed showed TCA levels of 2.6 and 3.2 parts per trillion. Hanzell published the results.
I know what to expect when Laube likes a wine, as long as it’s a Cab or meritage type, or a Zin. It doesn’t matter because I don’t buy wine based on his assessments, but if I did, I would be able to gauge accordingly. Back to the 2001s - he should have rated them but indicated that he found a high percentage of corked wines, rather than awarding a 69 to make a statement.
The numbers speak for themselves. I guess Ridge Monte Bello, Merryvale Profile, and Dunn Howell Mountain got ratings of 88 in protest of a few other wineries having TCA issues. That really makes a lot of sense. Bo Barrett says he doesn’t detect TCA below 4.5 ppt; he must be a really crappy taster.
My mother, a serious cook and food lover going back to the 1970s, has noticed a degradation in her sense of smell already, and she’s only in her 60s. It’s hard for me to imagine that anything other than denial and hubris allows critics to seriously work into their 70s and 80s. It would be like assuming a basketball player could star into his 50s.
Have you opened any of these 2001 Formans recently? Thinking I may open for Valentines Day dinner.
Last note in CT was a flawed wine but the two other notes from 2019 make me think it should be good.