Tonight I popped a bottle of the 2012 Marcel Lapierre Morgon. This is the first bottle I’ve popped since release. It’s been standing up for a week, so a good decant gets it off the very fine sediment and leaves a beautful, bright, clear cherry red wine. A lovely nose in the Grassl Cru glass, with bright cherry and strawberry fruit, with cinnamon, floral and earthy notes. Very pretty on the palate, with a suppleness that coats the tongue, but it’s almost weightless, with nicely integrated cherry/strawberry, earthy and gravelly notes, along with some clove and spice. Not a powerhouse like the '09 Cuvee Marcel I had last week (I think I forgot to post on it), but to me a more representative, true Cru Beaujolais. Delicious and pure right now…it has a little structure and acid left, but it’s pretty close to its apex I think. Approx…90-92.
Maybe it’s just me, or the way I like wines, but I’m often surprised by people who post CT notes that are so different from my impressions. I’ll see a note about a wine being on the downslope and when I open a bottle it’s still on the young side. Either a lot of people really enjoy young, primary wines, or there’s a lot of variation. One note on this wine from March says:
“This wine is years past its peak and practically outside its drinking window. it lacks the juice quality, the brightness and even the hue that make young wines from Marcel Lapierre so compelling. What this does show are the limitations of “natural winemaking”. Even from an outstanding producer, the wines has very limited aging potential. Ultimately, this is disappointing as - at least in my book- this is how most wines are evaluated.there’s always storage issues that could lead to different notes, but I know this bottle has been stored well.”
I know this bottle has been stored well, and it’s definitely in a good spot right now. And there’s no flaws, no brett, no signs of bad “natural winemaking”, either. Just pretty, pure, delicious, Lapierre goodness.
There is a reason I only read the notes of certain people on CellarTracker. As much as I love the platform, the bulk of the tasting notes are worse than useless.
I think we are all learning and developing a certain soft skill in recent years, where you scan through public user reviews and try to make it helpful to you in making decisions. For example, we look at the user reviews on Amazon and Yelp, or the comments after an online recipe.
How do you identify the information that is helpful to you, filter out the information that isn’t helpful (angry cranks, one-off experiences that won’t apply to you, people with some agenda) and zero in on things that can help you?
CT is the same. There is useful information in there to assist decisions about purchases, decanting, when to open and so forth, and I think (in my opinion) it is beyond exclusively looking at comments from specific people you know. But it’s highly variable and imperfect, and it’s always a soft, nuanced, skill you have to develop, looking at clues and trends and filtering out noise.
Our brains are already designed to perform this kind of filtering. We do it every minute we are awake, actually. Your brain knows which sounds and feelings to ignore (e.g. the feeling of you clothes touching your skin, the distant sound of cars and planes, the sound of the air conditioner or heating, the feeling of your heart beating) and which ones to focus on instead.
So you just have to apply that to today’s world of customer feedback. I would suggest that you do not just dismiss the ability to get value there out of hand – “I don’t know who these people are or what condition their bottle was in so therefore nothing out of all of the things to read could be of any value whatsoever to me.”
Just my two cents. Filter it out if you think it has no value.
I think it does have value, Chris, especially when there are a variety of different notes. But I also wonder if a lot of tasters really don’t like mature or more subtle wines and without knowing their individual taste it makes it hard to gauge the notes sometimes.
It’s an outlier note. The person’s other notes I quickly peeked at look okay. So, maybe a bad bottle of the correct wine, maybe a misplaced note on the Sans Soufre. Misentries are common enough on CT and the “natural wine” comment hints at that possibility.
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