I think you’d instantly become the Greatest Hero In all of wine criticism if you made it your mission to abolish vintage charts.
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Yes, they were. And the changes described here: Robert Parker Wine Advocate - Unbiased Wine Reviews were implemented in response to what they said.
Still plenty to figure out but tell us what you don’t like as clearly as possible and we’ll work on it. “The functionality does leave quite a bit to be desired” is not exactly actionable for our IT department.
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Honestly, I’d love to. The reflect to consult one is so foreign to me that this is a real blind spot for me vis a vis certain customers.
William, you are absolutely right about this. But (totally unasked for business advice) you should do it anyway, and with as much detail as you can stand. Hell, give a different rating for every vintage for every commune/village! The people who hate vintage charts will ignore it. But the people who want to use them, or need them, or think they need them, will love it. And being the MOST detailed vintage chart will give you cred/score points above other sources. You can even publish it with the proviso that it gives a rough sense of the vintage, and should be used in conjunction with written comments.
Of course, if this is just too cynical, then ignore this feedback 
.
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I can’t agree. The Berserker crowd would barely notice. Non-Berserkers would demand that it be put back.
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LOL I realize you’re joking, but that really isn’t how I envisage my wine writing career, such as it is, panning out.
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Todd_eating_popcorn.gif
gotta think this is the most schadenfreude / therapeutic thing he’s ever seen.
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bigger issue, but those aren’t the customers you want long term. i’m sure you already know that.
Sure, here are some notes from 5 minutes of browsing:
Things I don’t like:
-Can’t view a single vintage with different regions in the vintage chart. Even if the chart is only good for generalities, I have to assume this is a decent-sized draw for the site based on how often I search for a vintage and end up on rp.com from it
-The link for “The Wine Advocate” in the top nav bar is dead, it could easily link to the latest issues (same with the other dropdowns)
Things I do like
-Very clean and easy to read
-Editorial Calendar is great, easy to find. Not sure I ever saw it on the old site
-I figured out how the search works in regards to articles, that was majorly bugging me and a bit check off the list
Things
-For the top search bar, it would be nice to have the option to search by article or tasting note. That said, I mostly browse from my browser and not mobile and it’s not that big of a deal
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You usually have such a fine ear for your customer, but in this case I think you’re wrong. The mass RP subscriber is not a berserker drinking Roumier. They’re still trying to grok the differences between Chambolle and Gevrey (or maybe even Bordeaux and Burgundy), and in the cases of vintages, the differences between years like 2021 and 2022 in Bordeaux. Sure, vintage charts are a caricature, but they’re a useful stepping stone for the beginner exploring a region for the first time. They could absolutely use a rethink of what info is conveyed and provide appropriate caveats and enticements to learn more, but they shouldn’t be abandoned wholesale.
To use a music metaphor, a sizable portion of your audience is still trying to appreciate the difference between Beethoven and Tchaikovsky, and you’ve made the argument that anyone who doesn’t already recognize the signatures of middle vs late Beethoven is a hopeless case and should not be educated. I encourage you to engage those audiences as well as berserkers… I think you are one of the wine industry’s best hopes at bringing a new generation of wine enthusiasts into the fold and you need to be mindful of what each segment of your audience needs to get there.
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In older days when the ability to research particular wines was more far more limited, they were useful in identifying “given the vintage, what are the odds this producer I’m not familiar with made good wine”… but I agree that I rarely look at them anymore. Searching on Cellar Tracker and/or a general internet search usually provides more useful information.
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The CT integration the good Dr Kelly spoke of is now working.
The listings from a search still look a bit like early Craigslist but I am a lot happier then I was a few days ago. CT integration is very important to me.
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To generalize, my issue with the site is that information appears to have been atomized onto lots of different pages. The old version had more density which made it easier and more enjoyable to use.
Given your criticism of the old chart, it’s interesting that you still provide all the same information, just in a less informative format.
How do you see it? I went to the subscription page, and I didn’t see the Wine Advocate listed.
That might mean they haven’t been loaded yet. That has happened to me in the past.
Surely, but it seems the article should perhaps not be posted until the wines are loaded?
In any event, they are loaded now.
Playing around a bit, I see that I can use the check box filter by producer name to look at all wines from any given producer, and it works very fast so that’s not a bad substitute for the ability to sort alpha by producer, though I’d still like that to be added to the sort options.
Another observation is that the price is not shown in the “all wines” view. If I take a long list of unfamiliar wines from a new article and sort by rating, I am very interested in seeing the price information (when it’s available). An unfamiliar (to me) $18 bottle with a 94 point rating and an unfamiliar (to me) $250 bottle with a 94 point rating mean very different things to me. In this case, these four wines range from $45 to $200 (release price) but I have to click on each wine name one at a time to see that. It would be nice to have the release price somewhere in this initial view:
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I access it through the tasting notes on CT. An icon appears bolded beneath the Pro Reviews.
That’s not the integration he’s talking about. What everyone has been waiting for is the integration with the reviews directly in the Pro Reviews.
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This may mean their site is not caching the results (in state) and code on the page is not going retrieve the result set again.