I think you are being unfair to AM here. When he started out he tried to award points in a more meaningful way to counteract the silly situation we have now when any wine with less than 90 points is not worthy of attention. He has since capitulated, understandably. The concept of scoring wine seems more and more absurd to me. Is my heavenly bottle of Ramonet Chassagne Clos St Jean rouge 02 really worth fewer points than a glorious La Tache 1990? that would imply that they are both aspiring to the same thing, which of course they are not. The idea of an abstract perfection to which to aspire completely negates the idea of terroir and thus the idea of Burgundy.
Bingo!
Disagree.
He scored '97’s and '98’s similar or higher than '99’s.
He just got it wrong, plain and simple.
I don’t think he awarded those scores contemporaneously, Paul, the 97s and 98s being scored sometime afterwards,though I no longer have access and may well be wrong.
I don’t really buy the concept of getting it right or wrong, though. Do you not think scores are very, very silly?
OK. The only one of these he scored on release was the 99 which he gave a 93-95. The 98 received a 93 in 07 and the 97 received a 91 in both 08 and 09. His last note on the 99 was a 96 which was in 2012. I have no problem with this. I will also say that I attended the release tastings for many 99 Burgundies and they were not showing well in many circumstances.
At that time I was starting to get into Burgundy in a serious way, and with the release of the '99’s I bought nearly a 1000 bottles that year, so no. I didn’t take the scored to be silly, although I now generally do.
I probably tried a few hundred '99’s in the first year or so of release, never really found this to be the case, that’s what attracted me so much to them!
My only point here is that for me tasting Burgundy is really only like taking a snapshot. The story of a wine will really be told over many years.