My issue here is: shouldn’t a wine magazine be capable of providing a rating, a valuation of the quality of a wine independently from the personal taste of the reviewer?
I may prefer Priorat or Bordeaux to Rioja, but if I review a good wine from Rioja I will try to provide as objective a review as possible, beyond my personal preferences.
I have seen a massive change in ratings and appreciation of Bordeaux wines with the change in coverage that took place at TWA one or two years ago. Some (many) wines that were highly appreciated and highly rated were suddenly downgraded and replaced by the newly favored Chateaux.
And now it is Rhone. Yesterday night I had a bottle of Le Clos du Pic 2016, from Chateau Puech-Haut. An XXL wine which I very much liked in its style (certainly not for the faint of heart). So I went today to TWA to check the rating and I see that it got 94 points at the time and that this particular wine has received normally between 94 and 96 points from Joe Czerwinski. The 2018 vintage (which was a hot complicated vintage in the area) got 92-94.
But wait! Then I see no review for 2019 and a new reviewer for 2020 rating it 88 points and with a footnote saying that this Chateau’s wines “sometimes lack elegance and finesse”.
Is there anything like an objective valuation of the quality in a wine or must we be 100% subject to the preference and subjectivity (bias) of the wine critic?
I know I am implicitly referring to some critics who are very popular in this forum, but my question is an honest one. Will now wines in the US be re-rated because Joe is reviewing there? Will wine ratings in Portugal be turned around now Luis Gutiérrez has taken over? Which ratings were correct: the old ones or the new ones?
Mind you: Joe and Luis are not the ones I am criticising here; I love them!
It happens all the time and everywhere - also and especially here in this forum.
Praise for some wines from one side, damnation and accusation of “turning to the dark side” from the other.
It seems to depend not on any quality in bottle, but on a the subjective philosophy how wine should be or being made - or not be made:
from ripe fruit (and appropriate alcohol) - or with moderate alc, high acidity and a certain astringency etc
( I m exagerating here)
For me personally any rating and any report is worth as much as the taste of the taster - what’ s the value of a rating of a vegetarian about a steak? Or of the chef in a steak house about falafel with tofou?
Yes and no. I don’t really want a critic who doesn’t have preferences or a perspective on wine (with the caveat that they have to be able to define and elucidate what they consider to be high-quality) but they should not go out of their way to fête something they don’t believe is deserving just because some appreciate the style.
We can all “appreciate” a competently-made wine and acknowledge that it will appeal to a particular group of people, but if the critic genuinely believes that a wine is hot, oaky, unbalanced, etc then they should say so and one can take away what they will from it.
I think it’s far less valuable to both a publication and their readers for a critic to abrogate their responsibility to, you know, critique the wines they review. Someone with a platform and a clear sense of what is or isn’t a quality wine shouldn’t feel the need to couch or hedge.
I guess you can do like Luis Gutierrez does: he says “this is not my preferred type of wine but in its style it’s very good”… And he gives a reasonable rating.
I think the value of that kind of objective reviews was much higher when Bordeaux was sold at a discount at EP. You need some objective(ish) advice to buy before you have the ability to taste. Nowadays, I view reviews more as trend-setters, aesthetic criticism, and marketing. In areas of wine production like Oregon, most of the reviews don’t even come out until well after most of the wine is released, and sometimes the wine is already out of the market.
Live by points, die by points. The whole idea of assigning some sort of alleged objective scoring system to the subjective matter of personal taste is foolish and a recipe for disappointment.
I agree with John. So do most aesthetic theorists of any note. Critics tend not to, probably because accepting that what one does is subjective tends to undercut the value of one’s claims. It is, at any rate the case, that there are no agreed upon criteria for evaluating artworks. Disputes over values thus quickly become disputes over criteria and then table pounding about how everybody else of note agrees with you.
The situation with wine is obviously worse. Not only are criteria not agreed on (what’s in the glass, accuracy of reflection of terroir, made according to this method or that one?), but, finally, one experiences it purely through taste and taste is ineluctably variable. If you don’t like brussel sprouts and I do, there is no method of judging between us.
For your ends, however, there is a solution. If you like Puech-Haut, then the wine is objectively good as far as you are concerned and you should buy it. Critics provide word of mouth, not objective conclusions. Find one whose word of mouth you like, if you must, and use him or her as a guide to decide what to taste.
Oh, by all means! I am not going to stop drinking a wine that I like just because it changes rating by a wine critic.
I was merely stating a fact: the inconsistency of these reviews. But, if anything, these inconsistencies sometimes work to the consumers’ advantage: for instance, during the past year I have been able to buy a couple of cases of Pontet-Canet 2019 at a fairly cheap price!
