And I do think that, even if your preferences/scoring would be different than Jeff’s, his reviews do a good job of describing the wine in a way that helps you make a buying decision.
In other words, read the text rather than just the score, and Jeff’s work is very helpful even if your palate preferences differ from his.
For example, Jeff gave a 94 score to 2015 Lascombes, but here is the actual final review:
Dark in color the wine is deep in color, the fruits are dark, there is flesh, sweetness and oak, but the texture is voluptuous, and with all that ripe fruit, everything works, coming together nicely.
So it wouldn’t be hard for those with a preference for more classical Bordeaux to read that and say “that’s clearly not a wine for me.” Or maybe giving it a Vizzini spin, “I can clearly not choose the wine in front of Jeff.”
I found he was a wonderful critic. He has scores that correlate really well to certain trigger words in his reviews. I don’t share his palate at all but it’s reasonably consistent, so I can read his review, look for certain things and accurately re-score the wine to my palate from his.
Isn’t much of the problem of tasting too many wines at once just inherent to tasting too many wines at once?
Personally, I have no label bias, nor expectation bias. That means bringing full context to tasting a very familiar wine, including being hypercritical of any failure to live up to expectation. I think that’s where any professional critic should be. If they need blind tasting to counter their biases, they aren’t qualified to be a critic.
So, I pretty much agree. The problem is the sheer number of wines a major publication needs to review. Blind tasting is a good exercise for our perceptions, in learning and keeping them in check.