I suppose I started this out of frustration with what T Wills described…the critics rave, I buy, and in many cases get stuck with crap. OK, sometimes crap, sometimes just wine that did not live up to it’s incredible billing, sometimes wine like the 99 Boillots and the 00 and 02 Fevres that showed a remarkably high percentage of premox…at least in my West Coast wine drinking experience. And yet we never hear anything about how these wines are doing, just more big numbers for the latest vintage.
this thread caused me to open the 04 Corton Charlie from Boillot. I’m enjoying it very much and it has much upside potential.
alan
Robert–you and I tried a while back to raise a groundswell of opinion aimed at getting tanzer and whoever else we could to reassess their reviews a number of years down the line. Gilman, and to a certain extent meadows do this at times (Coates did as well). It was surprising to me, and you, that the first response usually is “why?” I think reviewers are pretty confident in their assessments, and more and more live in the here and now, which is really where the action is. Reviewing 10 year old wines is expensive and is of interest to the serious subscribers, but is out of the producer and retailer loop where sales are being made, and reviews are quoted. To be fair to Steve, he has included more verticals by Josh and Ian in response to our entreaties. But i, like you, would love a feature in each issue along the lines of “How are the highly rated 2002 chablis doing”, or “revisiting the 98 red burgundies” etc. Unfortunately, I don’t think this sells issues, and where do the wines come from. And if a very expensive bottle doesn’t show well, where do you get your back up? Anyhow, here’s hoping.
Yep,
Had both the '04 Chevalier and the Montrachet recently, and both were fantastic. Rated the Monty as slightly ahead of the Boillot, but behind the DRC in the dinner we did…
Don’t see the maker much though here…
Again, can’t say much about the lower level wines (had 2 '04 1’ers only), but the GC’s are worth the hype, at least the ones I have had from '99 on.
The premox issue isn’t clear, but still seems to mostly be at the lower levels so far.
We tend to do this sort of thing in two Burg. groups I participate in, and the results are always surprising. And yes, there are always bottles that don’t stack up for whatever reason…
Still, I agree it would be nice to see more of this sort of thing done by the reviewers, especially in line with their original impressions and maybe also any other bottles along the way…
So, simplifying greatly, there seems to be a consensus that the Henri Boillot wines, particularly at the upper levels, are quite good, and their superlative ratings are appropriate as they can often compete in quality with the more “established” star producers such as Leflaive and Coche. Therefore, despite my premox issues with the 99 and 00 Boillots, they may not be among the Most Prone producers and worthy of further consideration…though it is too early to say whether the 07’s , etc. will turn.
that’s about right.
We tend to do this sort of thing in two Burg. groups I participate in, and the results are always surprising. And yes, there are always bottles that don’t stack up for whatever reason…
Still, I agree it would be nice to see more of this sort of thing done by the reviewers, especially in line with their original impressions and maybe also any other bottles along the way…[/quote]
Paul
A frequent response was “hey, it’s not of value to have the reviewers revisit wines 5-10-15 years later since that information is available on the boards, or cellar tracker, or in our own tasting groups”. I was surprised how many folks felt this way. Of course there was an equal number who felt as I do, and I think Robert does, that if a reviewer gives a wine a resounding 95 or 97 on release, he should regularly and publicly revisist such wines when closer to mature to see if the opinion was correct and validate his scoring.
Thread drift here but I agree. Both Tanzer and BH do numerous tastings around the country and I rather see these written up than say BH’s Cali reviews.
Yeah,
Always better when done by a professional, after all that’s why we read their reviews in the first place, so it’s a shame they don’t do it more.
There is just so much more to a wine than just how it appears on release…
Good to see BH sometimes add newer notes on wines to the database also, although sometimes they are pretty much cut and paste the previous one (which I always find a bit odd, especially after a year or so), but sometimes he does admit he got the first impressions of a wine wrong (better/worse than he thought…).
(cont.) …and simplifying greatly once again, there seems to be a consensus that the Fevre wines are good (when not premoxed) but, despite the comparable scores, they don’t necessarily turn into something great that can give Raveneau a run for it’s money.
And as to the other subject, that which I have flogged mercilessly, I will simply reiterate that wine criticism should not only consist of an opinion, hopefully accurately predictive but occasionally incorrect, of how a wine shows upon release, but also an assessment of how that producer’s wines are aging. Even aside from premox issues, which are obviously sporadic in nature, though some producers are more afflicted than others, the evaluation of aging potential requires more than the critics’ initial impressions from barrel tasting and upon release. It requires reassessment over time (no, not every wine, for God’s sake) with some conclusions
drawn that can inform the rest of us. Gilman does this, though I worry that as he reviews more and more new releases, there will be fewer of the articles that present a true “view from the cellar”. Burghound’s retrospective tastings are moe limited to very high end vertical tastings, though his database is an invaluable resource. Tanzer covers the world, so no time to look back and reassess. Perhaps the financial implications of running a wine newsletter dictate this…tasting notes, the earlier the better, sell wine, and having your reviews quoted increases your influence and sells subscriptions. Nevertheless, a big piece of the puzzle is missing and the consumer loses out. Not that anyone owes us better…just that we wine buyers are going to make mistakes and waste dollars until we slowly figure out for ourselves which producers aren’t living up to the hype.
Re: the issue of tasting wines again some years down the road, I see several problems with that, and they all pretty much boil down to either economic constraints or provenance, especially for a region such as Burgundy. The initial tastings that we can find in various newsletters are pretty much all done “from the cask”, which is free for the critic (if we exclude travel costs). Show up, taste everything, and on top of that the wine is drawn from the cask in your presence, which seriously limits bad surprises down the road (it’s kinda harder to fake a 225-liter barrel than a .75 bottle).
Tasting wines in bottles years after their release would mean either having a very large stash of these or going to tastings.
I’m not sure just how much wine such freelance critics can afford to buy for such purposes, but given the prices these days (and although ex-cellars Burgundy is certainly not the most offending region), I can imagine it’s not so much, especially of the top wines. Then there is the personal stash, but that’s typically consumed over dinner in a context that a professional critic might not find conducive to a precise assessment, or at least an assessment that can possible be compared to the original tasting from the cask (I’d rather read from a critic who drinks wines with dinner but that’s another story entirely). So at best we could see something like the Hedonist’s Gazette.
Re: tastings, if they are organized by a third party (i.e. neither by the critic nor by the producer), provenance can be an issue, as well as context/ambiance. And I don’t think producers routinely organize those, even for the benefit of professional critics. It would probably be quite counter-productive for the producer, actually: the wine has already been sold. If it is perceived as better than the first review, it will only benefit the intermediaries (secondary market). If it’s the reverse, it will harm the producer’s reputation.
T. Wills - I am 100% with you.
Fevre - I buy his Champ Royale every vintage and drink them up fast. Occassionaly 3 bs of his g-rcus but open all of them before they are 7.
Boillot - I have mixied feeling after vintage 2002 and do not buy them any more due to prices.
Guillaume,
Tanzer and Meadows get paid to preside over tastings. They could write these up.
I hear all of that, but what it does is let critics make predictions and not be held to them. Face it, for Burgundy and most of the fine European wines the scores aren’t just for what the wine tastes like on release, but what they feel it will be in the drinking window that they give. So people spend hundreds or more likely thousands of dollars based on this (if they’re new to the region esp) especially when a wine gets a high score like a 94 from Tanzer or Meadows. If they never check back on those wines, then how do we (or they) know that the score was deserved?
I get the entire ‘scores are useless, ignore them’ issue… and I do personally. But scores are the lifeblood of US critics and like it or not, when they give high scores it has an effect on buying decisions. Don’t they critics bear ANY responsibility to check back and see if they actually scored things correctly?
As for the financial issues… buy a case of the highly rated wines. Few people really will care if a Tanzer 90 was really and 89 or a 91. Those are middle of the pack scores for him. But a 94 or 95? Especially for a producer like Boillot who doesn’t have the widely known rep of someone like Leflaive? Buy a case or two and check in on then a decade on.
AND…Gilman does this routinely, publishing his tasting notes from his individual tastings and group tastings organized into retrospectives of producers and regions and vintages. (otherwise his View From the Cellar would be called View From the Cave). I assume Gilman is not a billionaire, just someone who thinks that evaluations of wines as they mature is useful information to publish. (As I stated, I hope that over time these articles don’t lose out to reviews of wines upon release…we have other critics who do this, we don’t have others who do what Gilman does to that extent.) Burghound also does this to some degree when he publishes his individual tasting notes on his searchable database, but you don’t get them organized and presented in such a way that you can get a current view of how a vintage or a producer’s wines across vintages is doing. Every time this subject comes up, someone says “Gee, I don’t see how the wine critic is going to find every wine they reviewed 5 years ago so they can taste it again, not to mention the expense of it all!”. That misses the point entirely…as pointed out here, the critics preside over tastings across the country and probably have the opportunities to taste many more older wines than any of us, and yet look at the tasting notes members of this board post here. These notes help inform us, recommending wines that maybe we might find on the secondary market, warning us of how wines are doing that we may have in our cellar. We arent all wealthy enough to buy cases of each wine to follow along by opening a bottle each year. Ultimately we will form our own opinions as we taste from our cellars, but this process takes time and sometimes leads to wasted dollars. Having additional information is never a bad thing.
And with that I will drop this part of the discussion that got us off topic. Every time this has come up, usually brought up by me, it leads to a back-and-forth argument between those of us who think that wine critics are of limited usefulness if all they do is present their opinions from barrel and upon release with no accountability as to whether their predictions held true over time (after all, isn’t that untested assumption why people pay attention to their opinions in the first place?) and those who can’t see the value in having wine critics discuss how those predictions are panning out. Either as a consumer you would see value in this or you do not.
FWIW, Mike D (yes, that Mike D, from the Beastie Boys) has a blog on Suckling’s website, and he tasted the 02 CC, and said it was still youthful. That’s encouraging.