I just subscribed to the Inside Burgundy website. It’s disappointing how bare and lacking the database is of reviews and tasting notes. God help you if you are looking for info on a wine made before about 2014.
Before this I have subscribed to Burghound and wow is ‘hound’ the perfect name. There is no rock that he hasn’t looked under and written about. The number of wines in that database is quadruple the size of the Inside Burgundy database.
Immediately upon getting access to the database, I looked up some 20-25 wines I’m interested in and found reviews of exactly three of them.
Dude, you know Jasper only became a “critic” in '17 or '18? Before that he was was working in the industry. I find his reviews a nice counter perspective to Allen’s. Allen has been a “critic” for decades so of course he has more reviews.
Also, JM will post here rarely, some insightful old posts are searchable.
I guess if you think the total number of reviews is where the value is.
I found JM’s book invaluable as it was the first resource that helped me understand Burgundy. Would highly recommend. His website is a nice addition to the book and keeps it updated.
Yes, I too have the book, it’s an unbelievable resource. So thorough and far-reaching, I assumed the website would be the same. It’s because of the book that I subscribed to the site.
Jasper is incredibly knowledgeable and has an excellent palate. He only recently became a critic, so his notes don’t go back very far, but he is a great resource for help understanding what to buy on release. He will also stick his neck out for wines he believes in and score them accordingly even if they are lower in the appellation hierarchy. I don’t always agree with Jasper, but personally find his the scores much less predictable and formulaic than Burghound. Tell me vintage, vineyard, and producer and I coul probably guess Burghound’s Score.
Agreed, I subscribe to both but find my palate aligns more with JM (on reds) and I appreciate the 5-star system he uses. I know there will be a note on most wines I’m interested in post-2017 or so and I prefer using him for deciding on new releases.
If I’m debating between a 2009 and 2010 of the same wine then JM probably won’t have a note on them. But the BH note will have likely been from 2013 at the latest so is it really all that helpful if I want to drink it now?
I like IB, particularly for white burgundy. The site is less user oriented than some. The best “fix” is to sync it to your CellarTracker account. Then wines that are in his database will show when you pull them up, as will any other reviewers you subscribe to. Except of course Wine Advocate, which will integrate with CT around 2035.
I concur with the others who find the Inside Burgundy site to be well worth it. I use it routinely and I find the articles to be rewarding reads. The notes not going back super far are obviously a result of him becoming a critic recently, as others have said.
Seconding, too, Jasper himself. Really super knowledgeable, he also has a very expansive notion of what “good” is in that he’s not super dogmatic and is very open minded. A generous guy and a class act, too.
I subscribe to Vinous, Burghound, Inside Burgundy, Gilman’s View From the Cellar, and WA (for WK’s Burg reviews). However, at this point I am less interested in reviews of current vintages and more interested in recent notes and assessments on older wines. Unfortunately such notes are harder to come by. Being able to find thousands of notes on Burghound that were from barrel tastings or shortly after bottling is less useful to me…better than nothing, perhaps, but not by that much. Neal Martin’s Burgfest notes are at least a little bit later after release and somewhat blind, and Jasper publishes those too. Burghound’s database of recent personal tasting notes on older wines is useful, but is only added to a couple times a year, it seems. WK’s Up From the Cellar articles are infrequent. Gilman was always an excellent source of notes on older Burgs, but he is covering current releases from many regions now, so the older Burg notes are less frequent. Most of the notes on older verticals and such in Vinous are usually high end (eg: 40 years of DRC!) and again less useful for me. At least Jasper has articles from reassessing vintages 5 years, 10 years, and 20 years on, which no one else is doing.
I guess my point is that having a database of thousands of notes is nice, but I have had too many experiences where the wines did not live up to their early assessments, so if one is looking for tasting notes on wines from older vintages it would be nice if they were not all written upon release.
I’d add that Jasper’s star system, whereby a wine is assigned a star rating out of five for how it stacks up to peers in its weight class in addition to its numeric score, is by far my favorite critic rating system and very useful for buying decisions.