Do you still read Wine Spectator?

[GregT]

I’m not seeing anything conclusive in that story, nor did I when the statistical piece first came out. There is a universal tendency to conflate association with causation. Do high-performing wineries with high scoring wines tend to buy larger ads based on past scores or to tout those scores? Are they more likely to garner higher scores in the future, not necessarily because of the ad (if you believe the firewall exists), but because the techniques they used to get good scores in the past are likely to result in good scores in the future? There is no way to parse this from scores and ad size and frequency alone. A lot more data (no doubt proprietary WS data) would be needed to do an analysis that might lead to valid conclusions. I personally believe that WS tastes blind and that advertising revenue has no influence on their ratings. Maybe I’m a rube. But it hardly matters since I don’t pay attention to their scores anyway.

I would agree. It’s obvious when Laube or anyone else is writing about a winery that they’ve visited and
they’re talking about the wines that were poured, that those were not blind tastings. That doesn’t mean the scores and reviews were not done blind, and I’ve seen the little “tasting room” where the assistant sets up the wines for a reviewer who may want to taste there.

Do they all taste that way? I don’t know. Do their scores matter? As much as any other reviewer. And if you look at most of the posts on this thread, many people said that the WS scores used to matter but now they don’t. Whether that’s true or not, it would stand to reason that the people who are looking to learn about wine today would pay attention for the same reason anyone else ever did, so there’s a continually renewing market.

But in my case, maybe it’s getting old, when I see they’re adding new people and I remember when those new people were hired as interns or whatever, I tend not to be too impressed by their scores.

[Randy_Bowman]

We used to carry/sell WS. They required we purchase ten magazines as a minimum order. The only time anybody bought the magazine was if they were featured or mentioned in the magazine. We had people walk in, read the mag and walk out. When they sealed the mag, those people tore the plastic off and when challenged, they’s throw it on the floor and walk out. Yes, there are some major positives in reporting and rating, but nobody wants to spend the money for the opinion of WS.