“A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesman and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson
I enjoy a good TN as much as anyone. Writing them sharpens my reflection, and reading them can elicit smells and tastes (gotta get my wine fix without alcohol sometimes!), in addition to being a guide to what to purchase and when to drink. I love reading and writing about the great variety of tasting experiences that result from the intersection of varietal, terroir, winemaking, vintage, and the context of its consumption. I also enjoy a bit of respectful controversy over whose and what sort of notes are most helpful: are scores useful? Drinking windows? Flavor wheel descriptors? Sometimes I wonder, do I get it? Or am I a very good bullshit artist writing about a subject that lends itself to bullshit?
I’ve been thinking about why different tasters end up experiencing the same wine in different ways, and I’m coming to the conclusion that some of the differences are more due to the disconnect of expectations between writers and readers than anything else. Because the interpretative space between writer and reader is unformed, we end up with pretty divergent opinions about the efficacy of individual TNs or TN writers, highlighted by apparently inconsistent notes about the same wine. Who is right? Is one of these tasters less able to accurately observe the wine they are drinking? Or is there bottle variation? Or is the wine evolving? Many a wine BB thread has gone off the rails as different people try to sort out how they can have such different impressions of what should be – or what we expect to be – a somewhat similar experience.
I’m sure some people out there will take exception to the assertion that the same bottling ought to create somewhat similar experiences, but think about it this way: if we didn’t have the expectation that a given bottling has internal consistency, there wouldn’t be a point to TNs in the first place. It would be a crapshoot. We might still enjoy fine wine, but reading and writing about it would be exceedingly frustrating. Like Red Burgs?
So most of us get some value from TNs, while at the same time, we end up arguing (hopefully respectfully) about the details.
So here’s my thesis: we should be inconsistent in how much consistency we expect from various wines. It is well understood that decades-old aged wines end up all over the map, a fact that counterfeit artists have leveraged in their frauds. But other times, I think we end up talking past each other because we expect too high a degree of consistency that is not always possible.
Chardonnay, for example, seems to be the easiest varietal to write about, with a high degree of consistency across professional and amateur critics. Sure, there are stylistic preferences, mostly around oak flavors and acid levels, but the nature of Chardonnay makes it easier to accurately perceive and therefore describe those attributes, so TNs written by people with different tastes than myself can still be useful.
There have been a few threads analyzing the disappointing level of appreciation for Syrah in the marketplace, and one common theme of those threads is noting how Syrah can turn out so differently, from gloopy-sweet oak oozemonsters to ashy cool climate wines on the edge of austere. Serious winos are learning the sub-categories and altering expectations accordingly. The broader marketplace suffers because most consumers are stuck on varietal as the principal label that creates expectations. When expectations aren’t met, experiences aren’t as positive, even if the underlying wine is worthy when evaluated on the basis of concentration, balance, and complexity.
IMO, many a wine writer assumes too much about the ability of their readers to interpret their TNs as snapshots, and to further realize that some snapshots are of wines that are more stable and predictable than others. I know this from experience as a reader. I took a leap in my wine appreciation when I started to read about wine instead of just buying, drinking, and following up on producers I liked from the supermarket. As I tapped into wine blogs, the IWC, TWA, WS, etc., I lacked the sophistication to interpret different TNs in different ways. Some of this was cured by experience, but I’m still learning.
So I’d like to ask a question: can we identify some traits that correlate to more or less reliable TNs? Some we already know: we don’t expect a wine that has been shown to have brett issues to create similar TNs from different writers. We don’t expect very old wines to be consistent. I gather that old-vine Grenache can “shut down” and so I discount TNs about certain CdPs of middling age. Are there other generalizations we can make that will close the gap between readers and writers, and therefore make TNs more valuable? Are there some varietals, terroirs, and winemaking techniques that just inherently produce more stable wines whose evolution can be expected to follow a familiar pattern?
And, to contextualize the inspiration for this analysis a bit, is it possible that Robert Parker’s successes and failures are explained by this disconnect? Was his early success with Cabernet based wines, and “clean” Rhones (which are therefore inherently more consistent, making his notes more valid), and Chardonnay in general, applied, by Parker himself, to all wines, leading to the Burgundy falling-out, the Shiraz mess, and the shift in winemaking techniques to accommodate the marketplace need to create wines that make a nice snapshot early in life? Is is possible that Parker got off the rails by expecting consistency from all wines? Let’s imagine that his sensory memory is indeed extra-ordinary. Is is possible that his reflection has been tainted by that very fact, expecting all “good” wines to follow a consistent pattern that should only be applied to certain varietals? Because even if Parker gets this, he doesn’t educate his readers. (That might cause them to realize that his reviews are not omniscient 
) From my point of view, the value of his extra-ordinary ability to discern a wine’s characteristics has been overshadowed by the business decision to present all TNs as equally authoritative, when in reality some TNs are going to hold up over time better than others due to factors having nothing to do with who is writing them.
The validity of TNs is not all about the writer. They are also about the reader. The way wine is marketed has left most TN readers unable to interpret TNs in a way that would actually maximize their enjoyment.