Jeb Dunnuck really loves 2018 Napa

[Marcu_Stanley]

I mean, let’s do some math.

30 perfect scores out of 1600 wines is less than 2% (1.875 to be exact). In a quality vintage like 2018 in Napa, that’s well within the normal bell curve.

I know some folks get a hard on to rip apart critics scoring on this website, but still, that % seems legit. Now if 10% or 20% were receiving hundos, that’s a different story…

Add in the 99s and this means that almost 5% of all the wines in Napa get a 99 or 100, almost one out of every 20 wines made, wow…

[JLuch]

I feel most of the folks on this forum who actively participate are not shopping wine strictly based on their numerical score. It is used as one of the many layers in the buying decision made by those who are unable to taste wines in person, whether for practical reasons or more recently in the COVID era.

At least for me, using my purchase of 2018 Halcon wines as an example. I had the Alturas and loved the style and looked at AGs reviews/scores on the other wines in the portfolio. Similar scores and tasting notes made it an easy decision to purchase whatever else was available on that release. I try to limit my use of scores to that capacity.

[Barry_P]

Have the numbers outlived their usefulness?

If applied the way Jeb did, probably. I’m not a subscriber, but if what was written here is true…that he had 70 wines scoring between 99-100, then how is that any different than just putting out a really good vintage chart.

[Jonathan_Loesberg]

It would be much more helpful if – again, moving back to the thread – all these Dunnick 99 -100 point wines fell within the 90-98 range, which would then cause the the 90-95 wines to move down to the 80s and things would adjust accordingly. That way, you leave room for superlatives and the vast majority of excellent wines are still awarded quality ratings.

How is that more helpful? If a reviewer thinks a wine deserves 100, he should step up and give it 100. That is what the scale is for. There are reviewers that purposely don’t, or almost never give 100, simply on principal. I think that is crazy!

When the vintage and wine allow it, and the taster sees it that way, he should go with his gut. That is what subscribers pay for.

This is a misconstruction of what numbers are. They don’t refer to a natural reality. They are meaningful only in relationship to each other. Giving a wine 100 is meaningful in saying a)it is better than a wine one gives 99 and b) one has no more value left in the scale to score any other wine more highly. B) is the obvious problem. It’s impossible to say, without tasting all wines, that one might never prefer another wine. I’m not saying one should never give out a 100, if that is what one feels. But I also don’t think it’s “crazy” not to on the principle that when it comes to taste, one can’t know in advance what the best is. Using numbers as relational–this is better and therefore gets a higher number than that–makes sense. It will always cause trouble at the ends of the scale, though. Hence the desire to take your amp to eleven. Thinking that there is an absolute meaning to a digit is genuinely crazy.

[Adam_Frisch]

That’s what Robert Parker always maintained, but if you look at the scores, that’s simply not right. The very best Muscadet or Dornfelder will never get 100 points. Notwithstanding the stated policy, the scores in practice are pretty much on an absolute scale for all wines. (Sorry, William!)

True. For all those wineries who don’t make the big 4: Cab, Chard, PN and maybe Syrah, you can make the best wine in the world until you’re blue in the face, and it will never get 100 points. Wine writers will always be influenced by pedigree and belonging to the correct notion of nobility.

[William_Kelley]

For all those wineries who don’t make the big 4: Cab, Chard, PN and maybe Syrah, you can make the best wine in the world until you’re blue in the face, and it will never get 100 points. Wine writers will always be influenced by pedigree and belonging to the correct notion of nobility.

TWA database includes 100-point scores for:

Cabernet Franc
Cabernet Sauvignon
Chardonnay
Chenin Blanc
Garnacha / Grenache
Gewurztraminer
Macabeo
Malbec
Malvasia
Muscat
Nebbiolo
Palomino
Pedro Ximenez
Pinot Gris
Pinot Noir
Riesling
Roussanne
Sangiovese
Savagnin
Syrah
Tempranillo
Terrantez
Viognier

But okay…

[Scott_McDonald]

For everyone that’s having a conniption about how many Napa wines Jeb or LPB or Antonio assign 99 or 100 points to, consider how many CASES they assign those scores to. Many Napa producers such as Schrader, TOR, Realm, Bevan, etc. bottle single-vineyard cuvées of a few hundred cases. Many of the left bank Bordeaux châteaus receiving 99 or 100 point scores have grand vin productions of 10,000 or 20,000 cases.

Imagine if, like a Bordeaux château, TOR decided to blend all its To Kalon, Vine Hill Ranch, Black Magic, Pure Magic To Kalon, Pure Magic Vine Hill Ranch bottlings into a single 1500-case 100-point cuvée and Realm did the same with its Dr. Crane, To Kalon, To Kalon Cab Franc, Moonracer, Bourn, Farella, and Falstaff bottlings into a 2500-case 100-point cuvée, and Schrader and Carter did the same with all their different To Kalon and Las Piedras bottlings.

Would everyone complaining here then be satisfied that Jeb rated these four producers 2500-case “grand vins” 100 points, instead of having 25 different wines from them comprising the exact same number of cases rated 98-100 points?

No one bats an eye if all five First Growths receive 99 or 100 points. What if they each decided to bottle 500-case cuvées of their top three Cabernet Sauvignon parcels, a 100% Cabernet Franc, and a Cabernet Sauvignon/Cabernet Franc? They’ve now bottled 25 wines that probably would receive 100 points each instead of 5 “grand vins” receiving 99 points. What if LLC, PLL, Ducru Beaucaillou, Montrose, and LMHB did the same?

Would the people complaining here then be complaining how the number of Bordeaux wines rated 99-100 points went up 500%?

[Scott_Brunson]

The title could be changed to 'Jeb Dunnuck really loves ________ ’


Cheers!

This
I thought Jeb liked everything.
Seriously?
30 perfect scores?

It’s amazing how much better wine has become since the 70’s and 80’s. Can you imagine we used to drink that crap?

Still do

[Adam_Frisch]

For all those wineries who don’t make the big 4: Cab, Chard, PN and maybe Syrah, you can make the best wine in the world until you’re blue in the face, and it will never get 100 points. Wine writers will always be influenced by pedigree and belonging to the correct notion of nobility.

TWA database includes 100-point scores for:

Cabernet Franc
Cabernet Sauvignon
Chardonnay
Chenin Blanc
Garnacha / Grenache
Gewurztraminer
Macabeo
Malbec
Malvasia
Muscat
Nebbiolo
Palomino
Pedro Ximenez
Pinot Gris
Pinot Noir
Riesling
Roussanne
Sangiovese
Savagnin
Syrah
Tempranillo
Terrantez
Viognier

But okay…

Alright, fair enough, but you get my point. We can always find one or two here and there as tokens. But the majority have to have the right pedigree.

[Scott_Jameson]

I mean, let’s do some math.

30 perfect scores out of 1600 wines is less than 2% (1.875 to be exact). In a quality vintage like 2018 in Napa, that’s well within the normal bell curve.

I know some folks get a hard on to rip apart critics scoring on this website, but still, that % seems legit. Now if 10% or 20% were receiving hundos, that’s a different story…

Add in the 99s and this means that almost 5% of all the wines in Napa get a 99 or 100, almost one out of every 20 wines made, wow…

Do you really think JD tasted and reported on every wine made ? 1600 wines is a small percentage of the total number of wines made. I assume JD is focusing on the upper tiers so a skew toward the higher end of the scoring range isn’t surprising.

[John_Morris]

It would be much more helpful if – again, moving back to the thread – all these Dunnick 99 -100 point wines fell within the 90-98 range, which would then cause the the 90-95 wines to move down to the 80s and things would adjust accordingly. That way, you leave room for superlatives and the vast majority of excellent wines are still awarded quality ratings.

How is that more helpful? If a reviewer thinks a wine deserves 100, he should step up and give it 100. That is what the scale is for. There are reviewers that purposely don’t, or almost never give 100, simply on principal. I think that is crazy!

When the vintage and wine allow it, and the taster sees it that way, he should go with his gut. That is what subscribers pay for.

This is a misconstruction of what numbers are. They don’t refer to a natural reality. They are meaningful only in relationship to each other. Giving a wine 100 is meaningful in saying a)it is better than a wine one gives 99 and b) one has no more value left in the scale to score any other wine more highly. B) is the obvious problem. It’s impossible to say, without tasting all wines, that one might never prefer another wine. I’m not saying one should never give out a 100, if that is what one feels. But I also don’t think it’s “crazy” not to on the principle that when it comes to taste, one can’t know in advance what the best is. Using numbers as relational–this is better and therefore gets a higher number than that–makes sense. It will always cause trouble at the ends of the scale, though. Hence the desire to take your amp to eleven. Thinking that there is an absolute meaning to a digit is genuinely crazy.

That’s my take. I certainly don’t buy strictly on the numbers, but from critics who aren’t profligate in their scores (e.g., Kelley, Gilman, Kolm), I find the numbers useful within a category.

Scoring forces a disciplined writer to rank things by preference. Provided you don’t take them as absolutes, that’s helpful.

[JMReuter]

Imagine that I proposed the following scale. I will rate wines between 1 and 20, where 1 represents the bottom 5% of wines or wines of this style/varietal and 20 represents the top 5%. Obviously, you need to taste a lot of wine before you can expect accurate ratings. And, you need to decide whether ratings reflect current quality, best-case future quality, or something else. But, you’d just be putting wine into bins and it would be natural to think that some wines in the top bin were better than others. (Just like some students who earn A or A+ had higher scores than others.)

I think of 100 point ratings as a bin. Given that most ratings are between 85 and 100, I also think of the bins as being pretty wide. They are great for re-sale but, best case, only increase the likelihood that I will love the wine a little bit relative to 99, 98, etc.

[William_Kelley]

Alright, fair enough, but you get my point. We can always find one or two here and there as tokens. But the majority have to have the right pedigree.

I can see why you might assume that, but I wasn’t merely being pedantic: there are 25x 100-point Marsannes and 30x 100-point Pinot Noirs. There are 39 100-point Rieslings and only 36 100-point Chardonnays (and of those 36, 24 are domestic, and only 8 from Burgundy). Syrah, at 117, totally outnumbers anything but Caberent. I think most wine lovers would be more likely to criticize this breakdown for being too open minded, rather than for being too driven by preconceived opinions about pedigree.

[Brian_King]

Reading through the thread, I’m definitely more in the Brian Grafstrom camp when it comes to my personal consumption ratings. I don’t track scores, but I don’t think I’ve given more than about (20) 100pt scores in 25 years of drinking wine. In part, this is because to get a 100 in my book requires a nexus of several factors, including the emotional connection the wine can drive. In that context, I’ve never given a 100pt score in a tasting setting, where it’s hard to develop that emotional side. The upside is every one of them has a special place in my memory, from a 1978 La Chapelle drunk at Il Palio in my hometown of Chapel Hill to a 1947 Foreau Goutte d’Or at a friends house to a 1999 Rousseau Chambertin at Taillevent in Paris.

However, I can definitely see this is impractical for a professional taster. I DO prefer however those who are very tight with their high scores, because it lets me know it’s something special. My favorite in the old days was when Antonio Galloni ran Piedmont report - my recollection may be off but I don’t think he gave his first 100pt score until Vinous started. Today they aren’t common, but certainly not impossible. This applies to both new wines and older ones - the old scores have consistently gone up since those early days.

[David_Bu3ker]

That’s what Robert Parker always maintained, but if you look at the scores, that’s simply not right. The very best Muscadet or Dornfelder will never get 100 points. Notwithstanding the stated policy, the scores in practice are pretty much on an absolute scale for all wines. (Sorry, William!)

True. For all those wineries who don’t make the big 4: Cab, Chard, PN and maybe Syrah, you can make the best wine in the world until you’re blue in the face, and it will never get 100 points. Wine writers will always be influenced by pedigree and belonging to the correct notion of nobility.

Maybe in Napa, but a German Riesling did get 100 from The Wine Advocate about 20 years ago.

[Adam_Frisch]

Well, it looks like I’m barking up the wrong tree, then.

However, I won’t hold my breath just quite yet for the day a Mission nabs a 100pts score… But at least now we have something to works towards!

[Cris_Whetstone]

The problem with these types of comments against high-scores, or the number of wines hitting 100 is that most people commenting here do not score a lot of wine. Plus, I am willing to bet not one person making these comments has tasted the 30 wines in question. That is not to say anyone would, or would not score those same wines triple digits. It is to say that most folks here are talking about one taster’s view as being right, or wrong, or handing out triple-digit scores like candy without having even tasted the wines.

Not that this is new for the Internet

FWIW, I think I have given 210 wines 100 Pt scores, out of 21,147 wines tasted. I get Email and see comments about my overscoring wine all the time. But for parity with the scores being discussed in this thread, that is slightly over 1%. That average has remained relatively consistent.

If you really wanted to counter the idea that handing out 100pts like candy can be useful, Jeff, taking William’s approach is more useful even if I don’t agree with all he says. Jumping in with a post that essentially says “lulz!!! Haters gonna hate cuz we be tasting all da phat wines and they can’t. Whut WHUT!” doesn’t really come off as a defense. It’s more like an indictment of inner circles and access coloring scores.

[Cris_Whetstone]

Have the numbers outlived their usefulness?

If applied the way Jeb did, probably. I’m not a subscriber, but if what was written here is true…that he had 70 wines scoring between 99-100, then how is that any different than just putting out a really good vintage chart.

I had a thought along these lines that it seems like it would be much more useful if the headline was that 2018 was a 100pt vintage in Napa. With a intros being something like “if you harvested fruit in Napa and got it through fermentation you made a 90pt wine, minimum. Now here are the folks that excelled.” with breakdowns therein. At least then you can say these people did this well and those did that better.

[J_Rock]

That’s what Robert Parker always maintained, but if you look at the scores, that’s simply not right. The very best Muscadet or Dornfelder will never get 100 points. Notwithstanding the stated policy, the scores in practice are pretty much on an absolute scale for all wines. (Sorry, William!)

True. For all those wineries who don’t make the big 4: Cab, Chard, PN and maybe Syrah, you can make the best wine in the world until you’re blue in the face, and it will never get 100 points. Wine writers will always be influenced by pedigree and belonging to the correct notion of nobility.

Maybe in Napa, but a German Riesling did get 100 from The Wine Advocate about 20 years ago.

2019 Fritz Haag GKA AP #9 received (99-100)

[David_Bu3ker]

Yes, but my point was it’s not completely a new phenomenon.