Selected wines, lowest priced first:
2017 Corvelia Cabernet Sauvignon
2018 Malm Cellars Cabernet Sauvignon
2018 Merry Edwards Sauvignon Blanc
N.V. Billecart-Salmon Brut Rosé Champagne
2019 Williams Selyem Westside Road Neighbors Pinot Noir
2017 Caymus Special Selection Cabernet Sauvignon 
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Can you trust any ratings? I use Vivino occasionally as simply one data point if I’m in a rut and don’t already know what I’m looking for. That said, it’s usually when a wine has tons of ratings on Vivino (e.g., in the thousands) that I get really suspicious as it’s a good indicator that it’s mass produced
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Blockquote Ryan_Mills
Can you trust any ratings? I use Vivino occasionally as simply one data point if I’m in a rut and don’t already know what I’m looking for. That said, it’s usually when a wine has tons of ratings on Vivino (e.g., in the thousands) that I get really suspicious as it’s a good indicator that it’s mass produced
I do not use Vivino as insight for any wine-buying, but I did get a very good idea of the style of the wines by the tasting notes given by Esther Mobley. I have only had the Billecart and the Caymus SS of those on the list and our palates are pretty much aligned on those two.
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Anyone have text on the SF Chron article? Paywall….
I’ve had the Merry Edwards & Billecart-Salmon.
The Vivino ratings are just crowd-sourced preferences of the internet masses, correct? Not bona fide critics?
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2004 Chateau Margaux has 2500+ reviews. Big harvest, but does that qualify at mass produced? 
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Reposting the text I’m guessing would be some sort of copyright issue, but the takeaway as I read it is that her ratings and descriptors were fairly close on many wines to those from Vivino, more than she expected.
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I stick to my favorite authors on Cellar Tracker
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One of many problems with Vivino is that there’s no filter for people peddling their own wine. I know a person who does not drink wine or alcohol at all but has nonetheless entered a number of ratings on wine after ordering a number of cases. Gotta sell it, right? So give it a great review.
And the app is filled with those kinds of reviews. I saw that article and the ratings and they’re what you would expect for crowd-sourcing, although I’m a bit surprised they had Williams Selyem instead of Meiomi. Maybe it was a misprint.
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As far as I know, there’s nothing preventing someone from doing that on CT though. Right?
I didn’t want give away the whole article, but they picked highly rated wines at different price points.
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People try. (Not that frequently.) It is rarely subtle. And easy to correct and ban.
EDIT: Also, if you see something that looks suspicious, there is a link to report a tasting note to us, or you can click REPORT PROBLEM on the page for a wine. I will say, it is far more common that a real user drinks a LOT of a given wine and always scores it. And that annoys some people. But that is not the same and, for now, it is tough noogies. (We do not restrict each person to just one score for a wine.)
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Eric cheers to you for taking care of the in frequent clown that trashes a wine and you remove the review.
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On another note did I see you just recently visited Walla for the first time? Saw some notes from a recent trip.
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[J_Patrick_Lynch]
Selected wines, lowest priced first:
2017 Corvelia Cabernet Sauvignon
2018 Malm Cellars Cabernet Sauvignon
2018 Merry Edwards Sauvignon Blanc
N.V. Billecart-Salmon Brut Rosé Champagne
2019 Williams Selyem Westside Road Neighbors Pinot Noir
2017 Caymus Special Selection Cabernet Sauvignon
When you cite articles that are behind a paywall, you should give us a little summary – not enough to be a copyright infringement, but enough to convey the gist. Otherwise, this is lost on the 90+% of Berserkers who don’t subscribe.
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I think the dif between CT and Vivino is basically that Eric cares. Vivino is set up to get eyeballs - they raised a lot of money and the more ratings, the better, and there’s no attempt to verify anything. At least that’s the way it used to be and I have no reason to think they’ve changed. Even Yelp tries to keep restaurants from doing their own reviews.
John - you pretty much have the article right there in that list. She said that she got some people together to taste wines and compared to Vivino ratings and they were relatively close. She didn’t like the Caymus but some of the others did. Nothing of real insight.
Do you make the same comment everytime someone posts a thread on ratings from WA or Vinous? How about an article from NYT, WaPo, or WSJ?
There are plenty of threads where I’m not qualified to comment for one reason or another. So I don’t.
Hate the new site format but agree with Morris.
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She (Ms. Mobley) was the only taster, but yes, she was surprised how many of her notes synced with Vivino users. The rest of your summary is not consistent with the article. Except for a large deviation on Caymus. Hence the .
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[J_Patrick_Lynch]
Do you make the same comment everytime someone posts a thread on ratings from WA or Vinous? How about an article from NYT, WaPo, or WSJ?There are plenty of threads where I’m not qualified to comment for one reason or another. So I don’t.
I haven’t always commented, but it’s always annoying.
When I link to an article – whether it’s behind a paywall or not – I always quote a bit of it or summarize it so a reader has some idea of what the content it. What’s the point of posting things if the vast majority of Berserkers won’t be able to find out what it’s about?
I appreciate that you did quote the list, but without a subscription, I had no idea what the upshot was. The teaser in the link (“In a Chronicle experiment using the popular app Vivino, crowd-sourced ratings of top…”) leaves a reader wondering if the Vivino ratings had any correlation to anything else.
FYI, the Chronicle site displayed the first few paragraphs of the story (before a sign-up window popped up and it redirected you), but they didn’t say what the conclusion was.
The article in the Chronicle was useful for me, and I do have a subscription so was able to read it in full.
The reason I got here is that WTSO had a 2018 Napa Cab this morning, Adeptos for $26.99 and free shipping, …that I’d never heard of, didn’t have any CT ratings, and no mentions here on Berserkers. But 2018 and 14.5% is right in my wheelhouse for the right deal. This looked to be the only release by the fine people of Adeptos, but there was so much good juice in 2018 that there are a lot of one-off releases.
Crazy data set to decipher, given Wine.com has it for $165.97 (!). No data from CT or this board. Available for $32.99 from Vivino, with overwhelmingly positive reviews (couple of mehs)…which I’d historically taken with a grain of salt as most on this thread have.
So I searched on Vivino on Beserkers to see what people thought and came to this thread. And then I read the article by Esther, who I generally trust. I believe her method was to compare her notes, those of California-based Vivino users, and finally the Vivino community at large.
Key takeaways from the article:
"The results shocked us.
For most of these six wines, my rating came within a few decimal points of California users’ average rating, and our perceptions of the wines’ attributes aligned closely. Moreover, when prompted to name three primary flavors in a wine, the descriptors I came up with were often the same or very similar to the three most common descriptors Vivino users noted."
And:
"Overall, these results mount a powerful argument that when you get enough people together, their collective opinion of a wine will be largely indistinguishable from that of a professional critic. It doesn’t matter whether the individuals who rated the wines are skilled or experienced wine tasters — the crowd itself will probably get it right.
I was delighted to see this. To me, it suggests that wine tasting shouldn’t be seen as the esoteric, exclusive pursuit that it’s often made out to be, and that picking up on notes of blackberry and leather isn’t part of a secret wine-snob code."
I’m familiar very familiar with 4 of the six wines reviewed, have had multiple-to-many bottles of each, and thus the stylistic notes were easy to compare.
I ultimately made the purchase of 3 bottles from our friends at Adeptos…er, WTSO…with free shipping. So we shall see. At least I’ll have some value cabs with a different label than DeNegoce… 
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Were definitely going to need a follow up on this!