I agree with most of the comments, that Pro TNs don’t define our buying habits, but I think they are used more than we might think. Two Oregon example being Eyrie and Brickhouse. Only Brickhouse is distributed in my area now, it was not when I first learned of the wine. I heard of them through write ups, ratings, and TNs from WS’s Harvey S. It took me two years to get into the winery because of timing conflicts with either Doug, Al, or myself. I finally got in and have been a case buyer ever since. But where did the orginal info come from? Harvey Steiman. No one in my area knew anything of Brickhouse personally, including the retailers. Heard of Eyrie the same way. The old man was so adamant against visitors, except for MD and TD weekends, I didn’t even attempt to buy his wines for years, becasue of his attitude. However, the orginal heads up on the winery again came from Harvey S. Not all of us live in CA or Oregon and get all the first hand info as it happens. That’s why the pro’s play a very important part in our initial introduction to various wines. Today, after about 10 trips to the Willamette, mostly in the last 5 years, I don’t need WS’s scores to guide me, but in 1994 before my first visit to that area, it was certainly a guiding light. In 1994, my first visit to WV, how many wineries there did you know about? In 1994, this board or the many other similar boards did not exist. My palate and Harvey’s often doesn’t align, but I can read his TNs and have a pretty fair determination if I should even try the wine.
Years later, I don’t have a clue how Harvey rates current releases of Brickhouse or Eyrie, but I still give him the credit for introducing me to the wines and getting my interest via those TNs and ratings oh so long ago. I buy those wines today becasuse of his write ups then.
I do like using tasting notes of professional tasters, & I consider them somewhat important, IF I think they’re accurate.
I do use & like Tanzer. They are fairly good tasters in scoring & describing wine.
Have pretty much stopped using Parker. They are somewhat inconsistent scoring & describing wines. I’ve had numerous examples of the Parker crew getting a wine “wrong”, e.g. '89 Las Cases, '82 & '85 Lynch Bages, '96 Angelus, '88 Rieussec, '99 Yquem, & do I need to mention Mollydooker?
The Spectator is useless & while I have much respect for Jancis & some of the other MW tasters writing in Decanter, I find the “English Palate” somewhat bizarre, especially in marking down a great wine of heroic concentration & ripeness, & so have trouble trusting their palates in many instances as well.
Kinda surprised to see that many here rely on Cellar Tracker. Maybe I didn’t give it a fair chance (& don’t use it for my wines), but I find the quality of the notes to be uneven, & many notes from amateurs with unskilled palates.
Uhhhhh … Uh Oh - Sorry if anyone reading this is offended, but that’s been my observation & 2 cents.
I’ve been drinking fine wine for over 30 years so I do have a few preferred area’s & producers I keep going back to.
It’s nice to taste something you know is great, but it’s nice to try something new, too.
Me too…8, 9, and 11. I really like here, and CT, (and used to like ebob). That is probably most of it. But sometimes you want to explore more regions and you may take critic reviews into play for those decisions.
I would hope most agree that the more you know about wine, the less you need critic scores.
I won’t be the first to point it out, but I think that this maybe represents a paradigm shift that transcends wine and encompasses critical endeavors on a larger scale. I think that in an age of far more readily available information, the younger generations have chosen to use the weight of mass opinion rather than looking for a shepherd. I don’t know what is better, but I know what seems better to me.
The interesting thing is that I do the same for food reviews. If I am looking for a restaurant I tend to look to the internet for aggregate data, i.e. urban spoon, citysearch, et. al. I may also consider professional critical reviews, but not moreso than the mass data. It does require separation of the wheat from the chaff, but you get used to it. Tone and use of language set the standards, and you can tell who knows their stuff and who is being an idiot. CT one ups that by allowing you to select and mark favorite tasters, kindred wine-spirits whose data is more trustworthy.
I don’t know if this approach works for everything. For things as involved as literature and music I would probably still opt for professional review. For a meal I think that relying on the data of many amateurs is at least as helpful as a few pros.
So where does wine fit on that spectrum? Well, whatever we may all do here, it isn’t exactly music or literature (IMO). I think, for my tastes, it is closer to a good meal. In the end there is an element of art to all of these things in my book. The difference may be the amount of expertise one really needs to analyze the medium.
So while you may see CT as unreliable, I think myself and others will use the data in different ways, and therefore find it to be more better suited to our needs.
All I really care about is the score. Often times, I find myself drinking a wine BEFORE I know the score (my wife must’ve bought it, because I sure wouldn’t buy a wine before I knew the score), and I have to do a little bit of online research to help me decide whether I like it or not. Sometimes the research is comforting, because it makes my understand that what I thought tasted and smelled like wet cardboard is actually a French grape called “pain grille.”
All you really need is the score, but if you want to really impress people or write a tasting note on a wine bulletin board, it helps to read those distracting words that are right there on the page before the score. Why, by the way, do they put the words first since all that really matters is the score? I say give me the score, and then if you must ramble on, put your words after the score. It helps a lot when the writers put the score in bold or in a bigger type face because that helps the eye skip right over that annoying text and the score screams out at you. Anyway, if you’re impressing your girlfriend or pretending to sound like you know stuff about wine, you might actually want to read some of that text stuff.
Speaking of scores, the other day, I was drinking a glass of Yellow Tail Reserve (I think my wife bought this without checking the scores, but I wasn’t sure because it was the “reserve” after all) and I decided to look it up. Well, let me tell you I was a little concerned at first because it only got like 84s and 85s which I never drink because who would drink an 84 point wine? I decided to read some of the annoying text, and all of these wine-writers use abbreviations like “V.A.” and “T.C.A.” and shorthand like “plonk.”
Anyway, what I learned is that if you look around enough, you can always find some guy who will give it 92 points. In this case, though, the 92 points came from an unexpected source – Paco, the guy at Kroger who takes the wines out of the boxes and puts them on the shelf – he had a big sharpie and was writing numbers on index cards and putting them on the shelf right in front of the wines. Anyway, I went over to the shelf and asked Paco if he knew that he had sold my wife a wine that didn’t have a good score. Well, Paco points to an index card hanging in front of the Yellow Tail Reserve and says “I give it 92 Paco points.” That Paco knows how to make a guy feel better about his purchase. I decided to buy another case.
I tend to side with Bob on this issue, and it well may be one of age. Using your eating comparison, I recently looked at the mass review of a restaurant that I personally really enjoy. That publication gave the restaurant a lower score. All of the discussion was about the decor on the walls and the dress code. Nothing was said about the fabolous food and the terrific service. The kids were more concerned about the artwork on the wall being too traditional. They should get off their blackberries or ipods and enjoy one anothers company and the terrific food. CT has many wonderful features, but to me it shares many of the same faults as the food site above.
Yes, but that falls under the auspices of “wheat from chaff”, numerous reviews allow you to disregard those that dwell on decor or dress, and pay attention to those that describe the food. I understand your point though, there can often lots of crap. I think CT is actually a better aggregator than my food example because most people who devote enough time to use CT have at least an above-average interest in wine.
In the end any source of critical review can at best be of marginal utility because of the subjectivity of taste. I can think of James Beard award-winning restaurants where I am completely unimpressed (again, because of the food) while others are wowed (typically I think because of the packaging), and of dives that rate poorly on aesthetics but have great food.
+1. Although I will sometimes check CT reviews for things like readiness (numerous recent notes reflecting a “closed” wine will cause me to rethink what I am opening), but generally speaking, a lot of quasi-anonymous reviews from people I do not know are of no real value to me. Many notes here and on ebob are much better because (a) I can see who is posting it and (b) I have history with them to see how our preferences align.
Professional reviews are essential when buying blind (futures etc). For wines I have the chance to taste or with which I have experience, they are much, much less so.
I find the professional reviews and CT very useful. The professional reviews are best for new releases of wines I am not familiar with. CT is great for wines that have been released and people are drinking them. This provides a more recent confirmation of what the wine is doing now. CT is also useful is seeing how the wines in my cellar are aging.
8, 10, and 13. As much as I would like to taste first hand, a) that’s likely dangerous (hush!), but more importantly b) I rarely have the time. The guy I go through has a pretty solid palate that I find more often than agreeing with. As the price goes up, I’ll hedge with some cellartracker-slash-message forum feedback to get some extended tasting notes. Let’s face it, everyone’s got an agenda, and for every retailer that wants to push volume, there’s 10 people out there that either don’t want to admit to their buddies the wine didn’t liveup to expectations, or somehow feel personally indebted to the winemaker and dare not speak anything less than 9[X] points…usually somewhere between those folks and the detractors is a reasonable expectation of performance.
The poll is based upon a false premise. There is no such thing as a “professional” tasting note. There are tasting notes published by a host of self-taught amateurs, some quite opportunistic and self-promotional, others not so much. Parker. Jancis. Everyone on the Spectator and Wine Advocate staffs. It is a “profession” created out of whole cloth, much like art criticism. But at least art critics can school themselves in art history, should they so choose. A wine critic can become an MW, I suppose, but that is rather a game to be played by those who are good at memorization and test taking. (Thus, the Emperor of Wine is not also a Master of Wine, eh?)
Number one, you can always find a note or score from someone. I think every wine made in the world has a medal or trophy or score from some regional fair or newspaper or blogger or store-owner who fell in love with the wine.
Second, scores and tasting notes are great for selling wine to people who don’t know better. Once you realize how they’re arrived at, you don’t want to use them to make your own purchases, in part because of reason number one. I love to sell a wine with high scores from somewhere. But I love to drink wines that I score highly myself.
Do you really want to decide to plunk down $50 or $100 based on someone’s sip and spit 30 second evaluation of a wine? No matter how good a taster that person is? If you’re spending that kind of money on wine, presumably you’re a bit more knowledgeable than the person who has to get X because it got 94 points.
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