Scott… Tasting notes say as much, if not more about the taster than they do about the wine. As wines age, you also need to consider the condition of the bottle.
Each taster has their own likes, dislikes and experience in tasting wine. I see this all the time. After I post a tasting note, I often peruse the most recent notes from others. I am often surprised about the variance of opinions. Those differences have nothing to do with liking the wine, or not, or the score, as that is all just personal preference. It is the difference in the assessment of the wine I find most interesting.
For example, there are wines I think are really showing great today, and others state the wine needs 10 or more years. I’ve seen the reverse as well, where wines I feel have dropped their fruit, people are loving them. This is not just about the palate preferences, but the sensory experience of the wine. There are no rights or wrongs, just personal views.
Of course, as the amount of data continues increasing on each wine, it is reasonable to consider the value of the overall collective score. Personally, I prefer knowing the preferences of the taster, or small subset of tasters, before being willing to rely on their notes.
To the original thread title, I generally find that my wines improve with bottle age. Part of this is through self-selection, however. Some wines taste disjointed or closed or rough around the edges. Typically with some time those issues work themselves out. I typically buy 3 or more of each wine and try to time it so the last bottle is the best, or just as good as the first if it is showing really well. So I am not saying all wine gets better with age but that my enjoyment stays constant or gets better, depending on what the wine needs (or doesn’t) to maximize its enjoyment.
I think many people score young wines with an assumed development for the better.
How many times have you seen this at release: “Way too young! Don’t open for 10 years!!! This wine is tight as a violin string, heavy tannins, fruit barely peeking out. Nose is totally closed. Epic wine! 95 pts!”
to answer your final question; No, not at all. And frankly, it’s a ridiculous question to ask after doing the analysis you did.
this is one of those situations where the underlying data used was already highly subjective, sporadic, and anecdotal at best. by combining that data and drawing conclusions, you’ve merely amplified all these inherent faults. garbage in, garbage out.
The use of scores, reviewer or CellarTracker, and their description as meaningful or so subjective as to be worthless, provides excellent empirical evidence for confirmation bias (i.e., scores that are as the poster expects will be found meaningful). In other words, the scores are “just going through a closed phase.”
Personally, I don’t think scores tell you much more than where a particular person places a wine in his or her personal rank order of quality (and so I don’t have much use for panel scores, whether professional or amateur).
While I get your point, the data isn’t garbage. There are hundreds of scores on a very popular wine which would suggest that it would please a lot of people. I agree with the premise that folks scoring a wine high later in its life might like it for a different reason than those who drink it earlier in the lifecycle.
very interesting question posed by OP. Lots of good answers. To me CT reviews are like Yelp reviews, lots of inexpert opinions. Plotnicki’s OA tries to weight experience over youthful enthusiasm. Having written all that, one other answer to the original question is that two different groups are looking at young wines versus old wines and scoring differently because they have different perspectives. I prefer older bottles and am sure that I am a tougher scorer than many who drink the young stuff. Comparing is apples to oranges.
Beyond the comments above, I would posit that such an analysis right now would be more useful for wine with a shorter time to evolution, e.g., a California Chardonnay. CT is what, thirteen years old or so? It’s not yet powered to provide such data for a wine that can go multiple decades.
I think this is possibly a bigger point than one might think.
I also think for many of us, the score is often weighted these days by the multitude of others scoring. If we drink a wine we really enjoy, the score is going to reflect the tasters personality as much as it is the wine itself. Also, subconsciously we don’t like to be drinking wines that aren’t as good as other posters, I think that’s why most scoring systems become so compressed (88-92 rather than 50-100).
I generally try to read a few other tasting notes from the CT scores I check on. Knowing what the taster drinks and seeing a few TNs helps me understand what they’re about, much more so than points.
There are way too many variables to make any conclusion on whether or not wines in general get better with age.
Some wines are built for long term aging. Some need less than a decade. Others are made to drink within a couple years.
Some people like well aged, resolved wine showing tertiary characteristics. Others like young primary flavors and tannins.
Some people score their wines on a scale of 88 - 100. Others have a wider margin, up to 50 - 100.
However, this being the internet and a forum full of Berserkers, it’s a half decent, if somewhat flawed, discussion. My 86 is the next guy’s 92, and that could be because our rating scale is calibrated differently or because our tastes are different.
There are thousands of notes I’ve read on CT on wines I love where the rater totally didn’t get the wine. There are tons of relatively unsophisticated and Uncalibrated palates on CT, and more power to them for contributing, but they may not describe a wine in terms I find reasonable, and their palates may not mesh with mine.
In any case, I worry my wine may not get better, but I find a lot of it undrinkable now, so hopefully I’m not wrong.
the bold quote above is a very reasonable conclusion based on the data. highly directional and not controversial.
but in this thread, you’re making a giant leap to something approaching scientific.
your actual question and thread title, and the rest of the analysis, is inherently flawed because of the low value of the data analyzed. hence, garbage, in the context of the type of analysis you’re attempting.
Earlier in everyones wine journey there is a tendency to give undue importance to other people/critics impressions and points. Later on we all get cynical.
I agree with Yaacov. Lack of agreement between tasters even on something as basic and essential as what the rating scale means makes it unlikely that CT average scores are reliable indicators of quality. Or even if people, many people, think it’s better.
Scott - why would hundreds of opinions mean more than one opinion?
Popular opinion has made the celebrities of the Kardashians.
You have people rating wine who’ve tried maybe a few dozen in their lives, who’ve been interested in wine for two or three or four years, who don’t drink anything except one or another grape from CA, etc.
So whether various individuals think a wine is getting better or not, who cares?
The answer is yes. Some wines really do get better over time. That’s why you age any wine - so it gets better.
And some wines don’t. What some random taster thinks, whether a “professional” or not, is irrelevant.
