OK, so perhaps I’ve been placing too much emphasis on the scores and not enough on the notes. My original thesis was that given a minimum number of people who have submitted a score (2 dozen?), there would be a large enough sample set to justify the score. A. So may have hated the '04 Marcassin Three Sisters Chard, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that the 18 others have no idea what they’re talking about.
Lesson learned for today - I will try to find a few CT reviewers who match my tastes and look to them for insight. Who knows, maybe the next Parker is lurking on CT as we speak!
Exactly. Find those you trust and follow their notes. If you liked the chard, put me on the ignore list. If you hated it too for the same reasons, our tastes probably align more closely.
I use Cellartracker opinions mostly if wondering about an auction lot that seems interesting. The advantage being these are often recent opinions, not a critics view on release. I also like the CT feature that it shows recent TNs on wines I have… which can be a nice prompt to open a bottle - or bury it.
I do expect critical opinion to drift back to regional specialists - the model where critics all of a sudden become the ‘go to’ expert in a region, just because someone assigned it to them seems bizarre. I still wouldn’t get hung up on anyone’s scores, but if they write an interesting TN that appeals, then I might try a glass or bottle the next time I get the opportunity. That goes for professional critics or amateurs.
My question has always been how do CT users find out about new release wines. If you follow it back to the first influencer, chances are it was a professional (winemaker, sommelier, merchant or critic) that resulted in somebody trying a wine for the first time.
This is so the wrong way to use CT. You gotta read the notes. And for wines you don’t know, you gotta read at the top and the bottom. I’ve never had any Marcassin, but these two notes–one from a fan and one from a hater–tell me everything I need to know.
5/9/2009 - HERBERTO WROTE: 97 Points
I have to say, this wine was fantastic. And singular. The nose has the most distinct burnt butter caramel note I have ever smelled in the wine. I love burnt butter caramel. On the palate the wine is medium bodied, and insanely sweet. The buttery caramel note is almost comic, and there is lots of smoky toasted oak. But the wine has a purity of fruit and lift of acidity that allows it to pull it all off without seeming woody, cloying, or flabby. Compared to the Marcassin Vineyard 2004, the latter wine is clearly more subtle. The Three Sisters is a full-throttle, sexy thing. A fantastic wine, even if you don’t normally like this style.
3/21/2014 - ACYSO WROTE: 60 Points
HDH auction tasting at Tru; 3/21/2014-3/22/2014 (Chicago, IL): I’ve said before that Raveneau’s wines don’t taste like chardonnay, and I’ve meant that in a good way. Marcassin’s “chardonnay” “wines” also don’t taste like chardonnay, and I mean it in the worst possible way. No aromas besides oak. There are clearly defined wood tannins in this “wine”/wood extract product. You could run a bottle of this stuff through a woodchipper and get commercially viable woodchips. Yuck.
And now compare that with the three leading critics:
95 points Robert Parker’s Wine Advocate
Performing even better than it did last year, the 2004 Chardonnay Three Sisters Vineyard reveals an extraordinary bouquet of leesy brioche, hazelnuts, orange blossoms, lemon oil, quince, and wet stones. Full-bodied with huge, long, concentrated flavors, it first tasted like a grand cru Chablis, and next like a grand cru Batard-Montrachet. This is a fabulous wine boasting terrific acidity as well as a long finish. Given Marcassin’s historic track record of Chardonnays lasting 10-15 years, I would not be surprised to see this 2004 age like a top white Burgundy. (12/ 2007)
94 points Wine Spectator
Superrich and extracted, bordering on unctuous, with green apple, lime, spice and floral scents unfolding. Complex, concentrated, long, focused and persistent, ending with a delicate aftertaste. (6/ 2009)
93 points Stephen Tanzer’s International Wine Cellar
Slightly deeper yellow than the Zio Tony. Pure, subdued nose hints at lemon, ginger, spring flowers and flinty minerality. Then almost shockingly fat, broad and rich in the mouth, with elevated alcohol contributing to the impression of plumpness. Dry yet luscious, with a honeyed flavor. Finishes with considerable breadth and power, and more obvious structure than the Zio Tony. But this one really calls for a year or two of additional aging. (5/ 2006)
I agree with the idea that reading the (often relatively few, unfortunately) well thought out notes is the most valuable use of CT (well, aside from cellar inventory management), though I also think there is a “wisdom of crowds” element of value in CT scoring, assuming a large enough sample size. We can argue all day about the merit of numerical scores, but it does provide at least a baseline assessment of relative quality or value and is often the only outside source I reference when I come across an unfamiliar but interesting looking wine in a store or on a restaurant list and need to make a quick decision.
However, and it’s a bit of a minor quibble, but I do wish the software had the ability to only take into account a single average of all scores on a particular wine from a single user, rather than allowing one or two individuals to skew the overall average (i.e., there are twenty scores, but ten are from the same user – now what you really have in CT is a equal weighted average of the community as a whole and one person, who may or may not have any idea what they are talking about).
I don’t have the average palate. By that, I don’t mean my palate is better or worse than anyone else’s palate, just that I tend to like different wines than many people do.
Thus, I really don’t pay any attention to Cellartracker.
I pay more attention to some critics (eg Gilman) than to other critics (eg Wine Spectator).
I pay more attention to some posters on this board than to other posters. For example, I pay a lot of attention to ratings of people like Robert Thornton or Jeremy Holmes or a number of others.
I gave up on the critics long ago and I don’t bother with any of that content. Instead, I rely on the voice of the community that Eric has fueled through his site, a great place for sure.
I do ignore the points in CT and find myself interested in those reviews where people take the time to describe their experience. I sincerely appreciate the time and effort the CT folks invest in their notes and from me to you, a big THANK YOU!
I don’t put much faith in averages, but there are a lot of people on Cellartracker that I’ve noted over time that might tip me over the edge on a given bottle. I find it most useful in determining what might be currently drinking well.
I have added some tasters in cellartracker as fans, thereby i can keep track of their tasting notes. i dont give a lot of credit to an unknown CT scorer, as i find that almost any wine will have scores ranging from 89-97 if there are more than 20 tasting notes.
As someone else put it in another thread about CT: The best thing about CT is that everyone can post a tasting note. The worst thing about CT is that everyone can post a tasting note.
CT is invaluable for getting recent notes from just about any bottle, from someone who actually spent some time with the wine.
CT scores however, not so much. You have the issue of averaging scores that are based on very different palates, and even scoring on very different 100 point scales. Once the sample size is large enough to have “wisdom of the herd” they essentially correlate to price. This is perhaps fair, since most CT notes do indeed have a self-selection aspect, but this again is a place where palate preference will tilt scores.
I try to look for specfic tasting notes like gamey, leather (exotic pears…jk) then compare with other tasters to see if they found similar notes…then I like to look into the tasters background to see how prolific he/she is with writing notes…Though not perfect…Eric has created an amazing tool here
I love CT for well-written notes in general and more specifically for notes from certain tasters whose palates I’ve come to know. A few of those give me a good read on what to expect from a wine, often more than the pros. Wasn’t it interesting that there was not a single mention of oak in any of the 3 posted pro reviews of the Marcassin Chard on the first page of this thread? Yet both the “love it” and “hate it” CT notes focused right in on the oak? Great example of CT’s superiority, but it requires more of the user than simply looking at the average community score.
OTOH, I have zero faith in the “wisdom of the crowd” with respect to CT scores. You never know what criteria are being used. In many cases the CT average is a point or two lower than the critics, so I suspect a lot of CT scores are simply mimics of a professional score. I believe Eric tries to clean up truly aberrant scores but this is mostly done by reporting of problems, so there is no way to know how uniformly it is applied and it therefore actually adds another variable. It might be more valid statistically to display the median score rather than the mean.
I have noticed that CT does sometimes show the median instead of the mean, but only if the delta is above a certain threshold – I think it’s somewhere around 2 points. This doesn’t completely solve the problem around unknown criteria in scoring, which I acknowledge, though I still maintain that with enough opinions, the community as a whole gets it right more often than wrong.