Who is right? Same bottle rated 88-to-97 within 3 years

Who is right

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  • JM
  • NM
  • ST
  • WK
  • None of them
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2015 Thomas Bouley Fremiers.
No less than 4 critics consistently rated this bottle of wine 90/low 90s for a couple years… reaching a low of 88 points in 2018. Then a fifth critic (William Kelley) tastes in 2021 and scores the wine a whopping 97. The Internet offers no hints and does not clear out surrounding vintages, as there are no CT notes on this vintage or any other recent vintages going back to 2013. However, the 2013 has our own Jeremy Holmes piping up with a very nice note.

90-92 points Dec 2016. Neil Martin
The 2015 Pommard 1er Cru Les Fremiers includes 75% whole bunch fruit, the highest that winemaker Thomas Bouley uses. You could say that is evident on the nose that has a more sous-bois character, Autumn leaf scents tincturing the brambly red berry fruit. The new oak (25%) is neatly intertwined. The palate is medium-bodied with fine tannin. This is a pretty Pommard in the first half, then it resorts to type and becomes more structure and linear towards the second. But there is drive here and great tension from start to finish. Give it 4-5 years in bottle.

91-94 January 2017 Allen Meadows
This is the first wine to display any appreciable amount of wood on the very ripe yet agreeably fresh aromas of cassis, plum and kirsch. There is excellent size, weight and power to the concentrated and velvet-textured flavors that brim with sappy dry extract that coats the palate on the clean, dry and delicious if ever-so-slightly warm finish. This too is clearly built-to-age.

91 -93 - Jan 2017. Steve Tanzer
Outer quote mark Bright ruby-red. Lovely floral lift to the aromas of blackberry, iron and brown spices. Initially juicy and saline but distinctly powerful and backward, even a bit youthfully strict, but calmed down dramatically with a few minutes of aeration to show a sappy spicy quality and more harmonious tannins. Should make a rather elegant wine in the context of Pommard.

91 - Oct 2018. By Jasper Morris
Red Burgfest (blind tasting)
Rich purple, plush and generous nose, possibly at the expense of precision, but manages to hold itself together – just – on the palate. Undeniably voluptuous, then the freshening effect of stems with their typical tannins which are dry in youth but integrate later on.

88 - Nov 2018. By Neal Martin
Red Burgfest (blind tasting)
The 2015 Pommard Les Fremiers 1er Cru has a ton of dark plummy fruit on the nose, too bombastic for a Pommard and missing terroir expression. The palate is sweet and candied on the entry. There is a lot of oak here, quite extracted and rather “blocky” toward the spicy finish. This does not quite match up to its showing in barrel. Tasted blind at the annual Burgfest tasting. (Drink between 2019-2034)

97 - Aug 2021. William Kelley
One of the wines of the vintage in the Côte de Beaune is Bouley’s brilliant 2015 Pommard 1er Cru Les Fremiers, a stunning effort that unfurls in the glass with a deep bouquet of plums, wild berries, blood orange, rose cocoa and spices. Full-bodied, layered and multidimensional, its velvety attack segues into a deep and concentrated core, framed by rich, powdery tannins and lively acids. Seamless and precise, it’s impeccably balanced, concluding with a long, resonant finish. Bouley contends that his low yields helped vines fatigued after the hail in 2012, 2013 and 2014 bring their grapes to full maturity.

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maybe because wk is pretty damn smart?

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If you read only the words, and ignore the points, there seems to be a consistent arc of development typical of Burgundy in a ripe year.
Everyone is right according to their own taste.

Wine is ever evolving and changing so any tasting note is a snapshot of a moving target at a given moment. You’ve referenced five writers whom I believe most on the board would feel are not at all prone to hyperbole, and are going to give their honest impression of what they saw in the glass on the day, which is all that you can ask of a writer. I’m left thinking back in time to when a now sadly deceased wine judge and writer in my country mentored a colleague of mine who was getting into wine judging. I don’t remember the precise words but the nub of his advice was ‘if you think something is classy, don’t sit on the fence’. It would seem that WK caught the wine at a cracking moment in its life, and didn’t sit on the fence.

clearly someone needs to apply a point-o-meter device to the bottle and figure out how many points are inside. Only then will we have the correct answer. It’s science, people!

Also, Allen Meadows scoring a Beaune premier cru from an obscure producer at 91-94 points is actually a higher score than WK rating it 97 points. The hierarchy-adjusted Meadows score equates to about 102 points.

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Notes written 5 years apart. Everyone but Martin seems to like it quite a bit, and he notes that it was better in barrel.

Wines aren’t static things, and tastes are subjective, so we shouldn’t expect actual congruence across 5 years on the same wine, even from the same person.

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What did you think of the wine Shan? :slight_smile:

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My friend didnt like eating raw fish long ago. Thought asians eating raw fish was disgusting. I liked it. But now he likes eating raw fish.

Marcu$ Stanley

Also, Allen Meadows scoring a Beaune premier cru from an obscure producer at 91-94 points is actually a higher score than WK rating it 97 points. The hierarchy-adjusted Meadows score equates to about 102 points.

Exactly. And Jeb Dunnuck rated it 104 points, which is a low score for him, and actually the same as 88 points from many other critics.

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These writeups are actually quite interesting in that Neal Martin feels it’s candied, overextracted and lacks detail (“blocky”), and Jasper Morris has some of the same concerns about lack of precision, while William Kelley clearly loves the depth, full body, and concentration. Same broad qualities but some like them and some don’t. Part of that might be the passage of three years allowing the wine to integrate, but it might also be an honest disagreement where different palates experience the same wine differently. That’s an inherent part of wine tasting but it’s rarely reflected in critical notes where I often think there is a somewhat suspicious level of consensus.

This is interesting to me. I don’t subscribe to Meadows, and don’t drink nearly the quantity or quality of burgs as some here, but the idea that he’d mark down a wine because its maker is “obscure,” and not a revered name, and from low-rent Beaune and not a classy address in the cote de nuits is rather interesting and surprising. Shouldn’t the review be on what’s in the glass and not its pedigree or the vintners neighbors?

I suppose this hierarchical perspective is one way of doing things, but it would be of limited value to me as a consumer.

William doesn’t dish out 97s like candy and rating a Pommard Fremiers at 97 is guaranteed to raise some eyebrows and bring on a lot of "c’mon, really?"s. I do not know if it would ding that high for me, but I know William wouldn’t have put that out without being damn confident something special is going on there.

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And did Neal and Jasper taste the same bottle (their notes are quite close in time)? And where and in company of which other wines? I guess the provenance of William’s bottle was impeccable, ie straight out of the cellar, in Volnay. Lots of variables.

How would you rate it?

This continues to reinforce the point that an ‘objective wine review’ is an oxymoron. We all taste differently - including critics. We all have different likes and dislikes - just like critics. We are all ‘different’ from day to day in terms of factors that affect how we smell and taste - just like critics. And once again, wines are different from bottle to bottle.

Cheers.

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Thanks, Keith! And yes, while the score captures my sentiments about how the wine tasted in the glass, it is a happy coincidence that it happens to be consistent with my conviction that (a) the best wines are made by the best farmers and winemakers rather than by the most famous appellations, and (b) that there is no reason that Pommard Rugiens and Epenots should hit a scoring glass ceiling at 94-95, and all other Pommard 1er Crus have to situate a few points below that. As I try to explain in the accompanying article, when one sees where Fremiers is located (just below de Montille’s Rugiens Bas, which is arguably as good as it gets as a site in Pommard) and how Thomas farms it, it makes a bit more sense why the wine is so good.

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Nothing oxymoronic about it. Just because people have different tastes doesn’t mean they lack objectivity when tasting and reviewing a wine. Different strokes for different folks and all that.

We will just have to agree to disagree. If a critic is ‘not fond’ of overly ripe or underripe wines, he or she will invariably rate those wines ‘lower’ than wines that ‘they prefer’. This has happened again and again - and continues to. That is what I’m talking about . . . And this isn’t a knock against critics per se - it simply means ‘buyer beware’ unless your palates align.

Cheers.

Sure but that is purely a function of inherent bias of a particular individual. They can certainly still give an objective review. Perhaps the reviewer doesn’t score it as highly as someone who prefers overly ripe (or leaner wines), but it’s still an objective review. Almost all of the reviews for this wine are over 90 points, which despite the different inherent bias of the reviewers is reflective of a quality wine. I would argue that shows different wine professionals with different personal preferences being objective with their wine review.

I have no doubt each of these “impressionists” were giving their honest scoring for the wine at the time and conditions of tasting. There is much about wine assessment at a moment in time that is impression/interpretation/prediction rather than straight quantifiable science. IMO this type of wine scoring is a qualitative assessment forced onto a quantitative scale. That said, William’s score really does look like an outlier among these others. A retaste/reassessment would be interesting, although I have heard that many red Burgundy have an early drinking window then sleep/shut down for years. Maybe that would confound the findings of a retaste.

P.S. Maybe William is just having a little fun and [stirthepothal.gif] !?