I wanted to add that WB is also a great source for TNs of mature as well as latest release wines, with a volume of posts of wine reviews and range of experienced reviewers that exceeds any other board I know of. Board members quickly learn whose tastes align with their own and go from there.
As someone who is closely identified with the term ‘Wine Critic’ I find that I am not influenced by what I read at Cellartracker because i don’t look at it for any reason during evaluations., however I vigorously regard it as a great resource once wines are out in distribution and thus is a trailing indicator. Sommeliers, retailers and critics have an advantage (along with responsibility) to be among the first to taste and evaluate wine entering the market. Apart from the winery this is where the vast majority of information (and influence) on wines comes from. One of the headings in the article reads ‘The better the wine, the more experts agree with the amateurs’. I think that is actually written backwards. Professionally, I make a point of not looking at any material about a wine until I am finished with the tasting and writing the review. I do that so I am in no way influenced by price, production or what somebody else may have said. Among my professional colleagues, there isn’t much disagreement. Take 10 years of Blackbird Vineyards reviews for example:https://www.blackbirdvineyards.com/the_wine_portfolio/reviews.php
Experts agreeing with amateurs?? That would be like horse jockeys getting together before post time and agreeing that the 20-1 horse should absolutely win. I believe there are a lot of good palates on CellarTracker (as well as here) yet there are likely some who don’t want to appear contrarian or un-informed as to what they should be experiencing. So you wind up with convergence and very few outliers. There are a few new releases I just wrote about that don’t show up in CellarTracker. How long until they appear there?
Doug, I would say CT users as a whole have access to WAY more wines before professional critics. 10x. Falltacular is a perfect example, there are 75 wines there, at least, every year that nobody in the public has tasted.
In fact, many wines that never make the radar of professional reviewers. Until they become darlings in places like WB.
Not that it’s a contest but we’re not waiting. And there’s room for everyone. Critics have their place.
I agree there is room for everybody. However I am somewhat perplexed by your assertions. I presume we both can agree that 95% of the interest in wine is confined to the top 5% that is produced. Let’s further for a moment include professional critics in a basket with sommeliers and retailers who collectively for illustration purposes) are exposed to 5000 wines - a very conservative estimate that this group of professionals deems to talk about, pour, or recommend in a year. If CT users have access to 10x more wines before this group who actually devote their entire careers to being in the know, where and how exactly do you think they find out about them beforehand? Please don’t say another wine geek because it all leads back to an alpha case. where someone took a recommendation from someone with a job closely related to helping them make a decision. Tell me. Who are these people? Does the wine drop out of the sky?
I have never been to Falltacular, but I was able to find the list you posted from last year. If it was anything close to being a complete list, I think I am familiar with about 90 percent of the producers and several of them have cases of samples blocking the emergency exit to my office at this moment. Another thing - if nobody in the public has tasted them, how did they get there in the first place? I hate to burst your bubble but every winery on that list has an active website aiming to sell their wine, the same wines they poured at Falltacular.
Falltacular? Seriously? “There are 457,770 members on CellarTracker.” How many attend Falltacular? How many European winemakers attend?
I always thought CT should be inherently biased. While for sure some of the notes are from tastings or other peoples wines, a vast number are for wines in ones own cellar. Presumably, these were bought because there was something about the wine people were predisposed to like. Geography, grape, etc. Many were because people buy that wine in every vintage because they like it. And some, people actually tried it before and liked it. Therefore, I would conclude that most of these notes would be higher than a neutral population trying these wines.
As was said above, be it critics or CT, a note is only valuable if you have some feeling for the reviewer’s tastes, grading system, etc.
While I will agree that blind tasting balances the tables (a little). I think it’s also important to acknowledge that “professional” tasters that taste from the same region, producers, and varietals (year in & year out). I think it’s important to acknowledge that if you taste the same wines over and over…you can start to learn the producers…even blind. How many of you that have tasted Cayuse can’t acknowledge that those wines are distinct…how blind is blind tasting when there’s obvious signatures in the wines you taste repeatedly?
Point being that lots of people have access to wines before reviews are ever published, now a days, via many venues. Some of the larger publications take months to release their scores and they’ve already been accessed by the general public. I’m not sure what percentage of wines in CT have attached professional reviews but it’s very low.
+1 I find it interesting to see what people say on CT, but you always need to take it with a grain of salt. You often can’t get agreement from people drinking out of the same bottle (looking at you Levenberg), so why would you expect views to completely correlate.
I do find the reviews of the 2012 Terredora Fiano di Avellino fascinating. That Suckling calls it “full body” and WS calls it “light, elegant” is probably the most troubling. I understand why people get different fruit, I get it, there is some tropical fruit, apple and a citrusy acidity. Some pick out nuttiness, which isn’t surprising or unwelcome. I just don’t understand how you can disagree on things like weight.
At our LBTG monthly dinners we taste blind. . A few months ago, someone poured a Saxum James Berry 2007 (the WS Wine of the Year) blind. I have had that exact wine three or four times. Over the past decade, I have tasted more than my share of Saxum and every vintage of James Berry since 2004My comment was “This wine is way too thin and not doing anything for me at all. No flavor and too much acidity.” The host, who knew what it was, poured me some more and implored me to taste it again. Same response.
tasting blind is a humbling experience and you never know until you try it. I’ve probably tasted well over 500 wines blind at the LBTG dinners and although there are a few shockingly good gets, there are a lot more “I’m going down in flames on this one.”
I think the point is the “signatures” may not be as obvious as you think when tasted blind.
Don’t feel too bad Jay, it happens in the other direction as well!
I have had a few bottles that are well liked by most on CT, but I didn’t enjoy. I didn’t post any negative review because I was uncertain if something was wrong with my bottle or possibly due to my food or mood I just wasn’t in a good tasting place. If I can’t definitively say “this wasn’t good” I just don’t post a note or score. any time I enjoy a wine I will generally post something positive, at least an I Like It.
I would assume others operate similarly and thus some scores are skewed.
Vox = Sheer Idiocy, Yes.
Anyone who has spent some time here knows that critics are of little use unless you have studied their writing and found where their palate compares to your own. ![[cheers.gif]](/uploads/db3686/original/2X/0/0ff9bfcdb0964982cd3240b6159868fbdf215b1a.gif "cheers"){kind=small}
Cellar Tracker notes are far more useful for me because they’re a more up to date assessment of where the wine is at now vs on release. Also appreciate when people include how they prepped the wine. The critics are useful for new release purchases. Looking at someone’s profile and regions cellared can be helpful for deciding how reliable a particular note taker might be. Typically someone with many many btls of Burgundy is usually a reliable note writer on Burgs.
I often adopt a similar course of action when I taste a wine that I do not enjoy. I don’t necessarily intellectualize my decision; if I have a great experience with a bottle, I am more likely to remember it, and am therefore more inclined to post a tasting note.
It’s sort of an inverse “Yelp” review. I believe that angry, disappointed diners will more likely feel the need to go through the trouble of reporting their impressions of a restaurant online. Strange.
How soon til Google, Uber, and Palantir build a self reviewing wine, that will put all the hard working upper middle class professional wine critics out of work?