All commentary on the value of/preference for wine scores and reviewers aside, the format, content and volume of information Antonio Galloni and the rest of the Vinous team are putting out is really impressive. Here are my favorite aspects of the site:
New information every day and its presented in various interesting formats (interviews, vertical tastings, restaurant reviews etc).
Galloni routinely interacts on the board and is happy to answer specific wine questions (how is the latest vintage from XYZ producer?).
Tanzer and others are doing great vertical tastings of a wide range of wines.
Even with the newly skinned website, it’s making TWA look like a real dinosaur. I hope they can catch up because, as far as I’m concerned, the more information (and competition) the better. I currently subscribe to both sites, but my patience with eBob is waining, as they seem to have only taken steps back since the big acquisition.
Anyway, most of us tend to speak up when we have negative experience, so I thought I would post this positive one. Now I can post something negative with a clear conscience.
Hi Mason
Yes the regularity of updates are critical when punters have trusted you with a subscription. I recall many enthusiastic supporters of Jeremy Oliver turn on him when promises of a new website came and went, and in the midst of it, updates to his website were sporadic to say the least.
To be fair, Parker used to routinely interact with his forumites, though I suspect Galloni interacts in a better way.
… and whilst it’s good to see notes on older wines as part of a vertical, I wish in general that more critics would post notes on older wines - the mature wines they drink from their own cellar or with friends / colleagues.
I signed up the first week but recently let my subscription lapse since neither the site nor the app worked satisfactorily on my phone.
It is probably the best and most comprehensive wine coverage out there. But it is mostly geared towards the high end, which is to say not for people like me.
Parker did not, in my memory, interact routinely with “forumites”, and when he did it could get ugly. I’m a fan of the Vinous website but Mason, don’t be surprised if you get blowback here.
Yes, tons of great info. No one else is even close. I spend most of my time there now. I do see it skew towards the high-end a bit much for me. But we can 't have everything now can we? Between WB and Vinous I would not count on or wait for a resurrection of the Parker board.
I’m undecided on Vinous. I find the wine reviews to be in a weird format, TWA was much better for searching. I can’t sign on to the app despite help from their IT guy James (and my wife who is a senior person at Oracle).
Yes they have more regular content but I find it to be a bit like GQ. Lots of talk about high end dinners in NYC. Sort of like photos of $15,000 watches and $1,200 JM Weston shoes.
Most of what interests me now is Italian and Vinous is the place for that. I quickly tired of Monica Larmer who seems like a cheerleader for the Azzurri. If it’s an Italian wine and the can get it into a bottle it’s a 90 pointer.
I always found Squires to be pleasant and my experience was positive with RMP on the board but WB is much more active.
I have mixed feelings about Vinous. I think that there is a lot of inflated scores on the site and there is also a focus on trophy wines and tastings that are essentially irrelevant to the all but a handful of wine consumers (and certainly irrelevant to me). The La Romanee tasting of something like 60 or 70 vintages back to the 19th century was a good example. Other than to help the producer raise prices what real relevance did that tasting have? The other day one of the writers talked about spending three days with a certain well known Burgundy wine producer and all we got out of it was an aside that one the top end of wines of the domaine would not be made in 2016. Clearly, three days of chit-chat with this oracle must have yielded more than that and more information about conditions in 2016 that would have been a subject of broad interest.
There are those, and I include myself as one, who love wine and are interested in it beyond the scope of our personal consumption. And I rather doubt that DRC needs any assistance in raising prices. If a few thousand wines are reviewed annually, surely there is something of interest and importance for everyone. Perhaps it is the area of your focus that needs alteration.
The reference was not to DRC but to the Ligier-Belair domaine which has been trying with some success to raise prices across the board to very high levels in recent years. The mega tasting of La Romanee was part of that effort. The Vinous team covered that tasting. There was a long thread on Vinous about that and I won’t repeat that thread here.
I have only recently signed up to Vinous but I broadly agree with the positive view here - regular and interesting contet. I appreciate that the mega verticals aren’t much practical use but the whole process of bottle conditioning and the issue of variations in vintages is fascinating to me. My only concern so far is the lack of stuff from Jerez and Sanlucar
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