People on this board love to hate on this guy. But I bet 98% of y’all secretly wish to be him.
He’s internationally known, respected in some circles (not here though, bunch of haters), most likely does well financially, travels the world, drinks amazing wines. Has a much better life than probably 98% of the folks on here.
If you think he’s a shitty reviewer, don’t read his reviews. If you think he inflates his scores to land lucrative business deals, don’t read his reviews. If you think he sucks up to winemakers for access, don’t read his reviews.
But some of the comments suggest there’s envy, jealousy, etc involved. It’s not a good look.
Goodness forbid, we discuss wine score inflation on a site that is named WINE Berserkers. Brian, this is the perfect place to discuss critical score inflation. Critics need to be checked too. Some of the best, most well read, and experienced palates anywhere reside here.
No kidding. I’ve thought this guy a fool since way back in the days when he wrote for the Wine Spincter and was less famous. He’s one of the primary reasons why I dropped my subscription like around 1999/2000, if I’m recalling dates correctly. I do envy his hair and Hermes scarves, however.
The post did make my chuckle though as I immediately started rapping one of me all-time faves:
one thing I will say is I think it makes sense that their 100 pointers are at the top of the list at least. I never understand how a publication can give out 100 point scores during the year that DONT make their top 100 list. there’s some cognitive dissonance going on when your number 1 wine got 94 points from you in the same year
Has any one done any analysis to see if his scores affect prices , compared to say Parker scores? I’d suspect that, on other than mass market wines, he has little price effect. If so is his business model actually successful.
Hong Kong these days. And he doesn’t really care what people on WB think of him because he has thousands of followers who attend his events.
Blarmston is right - the guy is living a nice life, has a good time, and gets to taste any wine in the world. And seriously, what’s the difference between him and anyone else?
Look at the prices people on this board will pay for a new Napa release that’s good, but just another ripe, well-made, big wine that isn’t going to improve much over the years. To some people price really matters and rather than pay $50 for an interesting wine, they’ll pay $450 for a Veblen wine.
And then others will pay the same for a Burgundy that they couldn’t identify blind, but the label matters so much because suddenly they can talk about the soil and the history.
Suckling’s followers typically don’t pay those kinds of prices and they have just as much fun.
I have no trouble with any approach, as it’s a person’s right to do as he wishes, and I really don’t care too much about the scores from Suckling or anyone else, but surely there’s some irony in criticizing his approach.
Now that I’m done with that, what exactly is a Suckling score these days?
He has two or three other people doing reviews, so is it like a 100 from Parker that really came from Dr. Jay? And at least according to the photos, they make no pretense of blind tasting.
A couple of years ago I stopped at Total Wines and did their 5 cent wine tasting.
There were a few under $20 wines that Suckling had given 92 points to (maybe Amici wines were being featured).
I asked the wine pourer how these marginal tasting wines got such high scores from him. She informed me that he tastes his wines in price point groups - so the $20 wines are tasted against other $20 wines.
So these were good enough in that group to get 92 pts. - and to put it on the shelf label ads for the wines.
The point scores are meaningless then - two different wines with a 92pt score in different price ranges would have very different scores on an absolute scale. Seems he’s doing this for the wine makers and not so much the consumers.
Of course Parker has retired so what do the RP scores mean?
And Wine Spectator has had a change of tasters - I liked Laube - but don’t know the others.
As much as I dislike Suckling’s scores, there’s some validity to the approach in terms of aiding the consumer. But only if it’s clear how he’s doing his scoring, which it is not. He should really issue two scores if he’s going to take this approach… the first being an absolute score and the second being a QPR score
Ha yes exactly… to be clear. I don’t mean to defend JS. He’s clearly off base. I just think his system could actually be useful if he made it known how he approaches scoring.
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