I think Francois you will remember the time when the wines were priced and put on the market before Parker came out with his reviews. Probably stopped in the nineties, but easy enough to check, as the wine prices would have come out before the end of April when the Advocate was published.
Chateaux that did well realized that they were leaving a lot of money on the table. Tying in your pricing until after the reviews makes sense, but it does leave to some ridiculous games. The old Bordeaux game is still part of the equation; you want to make sure you are priced close to if not above your competition. 2005 was when things got weird, and I think it was well into June before the final prices came out.
The old chestnut was that the negotiants pushed for an early release. It meant they could sell and be paid in time for them to take their annual vacation in Arcachon.
As for the main question; the critics are pretty fragmented, which means of importance but limited to a smaller audience. It’s actually much more healthy than having one person with that much power that he can actually mould the market.
A full agreement with the 3 last posts : not so frequent
Jürgen : we did such a session, but I keep the results secret )))
In some properties, no obligation at all to take the GG or Grand Cru : the first wine is already a pure 100 % pleasure.
Non, no : do not ask me which producer : order from Jürgen !
Obvious??? No, that is not the case at all. Critics are basically interchangeable at the moment. Most offerings touting scores will quote 4 or 5 different reviews. I guess for awhile the critics competed with each other to end up at the top of that list by seeing who could issue the highest ratings, but it never really made a difference. Nobody cares what Antonio Galloni thinks about a wine. They just care that somebody, anybody, gives it a 95+, and somebody, anybody, almost always does.
I think the whole score thing is getting out of hand. We’ve all seen wines touted with scores from a different vintage, sometimes with disclosure sometimes not.
Today I received an email offer with what may be the worst abuse of point scores Ive seen. The offering was for the 2009 vintage of the second wine of an Haut Medoc chateau. The flyer headlined with ratings for the vintage - WS 97, Vinous 97, Parker 99 (in fairness clearly described as vintage ratings). No rating of the wine itself quoted. Probably because there don’t seem to be any for the particular wine online, the few ratings of the first wine are pretty tepid (Suckling 88, Jancis 15) which doesn’t bode well for the second wine. The best one can say of points quoted is that they are irrelevant, if not actually misleading.
[Im not giving the specifics as slagging one particular flyer is probably invidious and the particular retailer is usually Ok]
This is a strange marketing trick but actually not that unusual. In fact I see almost no supermarket flyer without scores from somebody in the wine segment. Even dubious “critics” are mentioned when there is nobody useable with some image as Parker (WA), Decanter, Falstaff or whatever.
Unfortunately the boards like Wineberserkers are marketing tools as well. Here are many people participants who strengthen the brands of certain Chateaux or Domains. Especially those on the high end. And here are people with deep pockets around also who are able and willing to buy or invest in high end wines.
At least younger wine lover gain interest in Domaines like DRC, Rousseau or Chateaux like Lafite, Mouton, Cheval etc. because they will get the impression that those are the pinnacle of pleasure and worth the money. Which is not true as almost any experienced wine lover knows. A blind tasting will help those who don´t believe it.
I think the whole score thing is getting out of hand.
Has been out of hand for many years. In a way, it’s partly responsible for the existence of this board.
And Jürgen makes a good point regarding this board as well.
But the thing to keep in mind is that at the end of the day, the wine business is first and foremost a business. It’s not about some dreamy romantic pursuing a passion or vision. That’s all nice if you have the money to support your dabbling. But if for some reason you need to generate cash, you need to sell your wine. And you use whatever tools you have to sell it. It’s often a backstory that makes a virtue of whatever you happen to have available to use - “tiny production from ancient vines” (any number of US producers), "an ‘undiscovered’ family that’s been doing it the same way for generations’ (any number of European producers), “a professional who left everything and decided to make wine” (not location-specific as they’re in NZ, Europe, the US and elsewhere), or you can go another direction - “loaded with cash and sparing no expense to produce the very best” (any number of Napa producers), “determined to maintain its position as the standard for the region” (especially in Bordeaux and Burgundy), and so on. And critics are a most useful part of it - they lend an air of objectivity.
There’s a tipping point at which critics become commonly perceived as shills. That’s what gave Parker his boost, plus the fact that people were looking for some direction as the US wine interest was still nascent. Today I think that social media will replace a single voice, as many people think a lot of the “professional” critics are shills or irrelevant, much as they perceive news reporters and others are irrelevant.
It’s not just wine - people want to get information from people they trust, and that is increasingly people who subscribe to the same belief system. There are people who’ve announced on this board that they’ve discovered this or that guru who will henceforth be their guide.
If wine thinking mirrors larger social trends, we can expect that in the near future, people will come to blows for disagreeing about whether a particular wine is good or bad. In fact, people might set out from their homes, dressed in black, to visit wine bars and confront people with erroneous beliefs. Good times ahead for all.
Parker no longer scoring Bordeaux has definitely changed things. When Parker was still in the game, Bordeaux negociants would usually send out their offers only using RP scores and notes. Since Parker has left, many negociants now include every score they can find from any critic to help prop up the wine being offered.
The point being that like any consumer good, the producer/reseller is always going to look for a base reference point that establishes the potential quality of an item. NoahR’s comment above kind of hits on that point. It’s not so much that the producer needs reassured that their wine is good, (although I’m sure they love the praise) but that the consumer needs reassured that they are making a smart purchase.
Crowd-sourced reviews and critiques have become an indispensable source of information for consumers to use when making buying decisions. But most of the time, the “crowd” would never get to the point of leaving a review if there wasn’t a starting point somewhere. Someone saying “Hey look at this thing! This thing right here is the best!” It’s because of that initial report or review that more people investigate the item and the overall review or critique of the crowd is formed.
It’s the same reason we have Motor Trend, Consumer Reports, movie critics, restaurant critics, etc. Those publications encourage consumer interaction and then those consumers post their own findings on Rotten Tomatoes, or Yelp or any number of consumer related sites on the web. The same can be said about how many people end up trying a wine that got scored somewhere and then posting their own TN on Wine Berserkers or Cellar Tracker.
IMO unless someone emerges from the current pack as the new RP, most wine buyers (that care about scores/reviews) will probably pick the critic/publication that best aligns with their own palate or use all of the reviews available to develop an aggregate score to use as a baseline for decisions on purchasing new release wines.
All that being said, I think that the Bordelais will look for any opportunity to raise their prices with or without Parker. But I just don’t see any of the major critics having the impact that Parker once did. A 99 or 100 point score may boost the pricing, but it won’t send it into the stratosphere the way that a 100 from Parker could.
