There are wine writers who I like very much and agree with most of the time but I know of no wine writers where my preferences align with them 100% of the time. For example, I love reading John Gilman. He has pointed me to a lot of great wines. But, he likes Corison Cabernet and I find that there is a taste in the wine that I just don’t like - whether I have the wine young or with age. It is not here necessarily a question of quality but a flavor I do not like. This is one example, but there are many others and these are with wine writers who have palates that are aligned with mine. Another example is dry German wines that get very high scores from Gilman and David Schildknecht, a wine writer I very much admire and who taught me a tremendous amount about wine when he used to work in retail in the DC area. I could go on and on but I have to ask, who are the magically wine writers where you agree with their views on EVERY SINGLE WINE.
That’s a more coarse scale the report card grading.
“100 point scale” is, no offense to anybody, simply a bullshit term, calling itself something that it is not.
“100 point scale” implies that in involves “100 points.”
No way we can kill this beast, it works great on the shelves at BevMo, but maybe we can wring out some extra ‘objectiveness’ by adding points beyond the decimal.
Who wouldn’t prefer a 97.65 point wine to a 97.64 pointer?
As long as I am ranting - Parker didn’t make lazy wine makers get better, his bullshit simply homogenized the marketplace. All hail fruit forward.
Maybe that is because a few publications have indoctrinated their readers for decades into the belief that their ratings are objective, unbiased, and apply across all types of wine from all regions. This gets reinforced by wine section and wine store shelf talkers, and merchants and wineries touting their wares based on numerical ratings.
I’d be happy enough with a star, or “puff” system.
1* Barely drinkable. Delivers alcohol
2* Lower than average quality. Most grocery store wine esp. jug and box wine.
3* Good enough for a Berserker to drink if nothing else is available. Maybe even pleasant for casual meals,
4* Range where most of us chose from, except for the wealthy
5* Special, memorable wine.
You can give half stars, or star plus, extending the number of gradations to 15, about as much as is used in a 100 point scale.
Berserkers could argue whether a wine was a **** or a ***+. As long as it leaves room for disagreement, the scale is useful.
I admit that this rating system would be useless for selling of promoting wine, except for the 5 wines that need no promotion anyway. That’s what I like about the system.
I’ve had many wines rated in the high 90s by professional critics that were, for my palate, complete messes. Many wines at that point level are ripe, very extracted, quite heavily oaked and fairly high in alcohol. I’ve often found that, when a critics leans that way, I prefer the wines they rate in the high 80s. Those may not have the power that wines points, but I find them more balanced.
And, in fact, it’s hard to find any critic who publishes scores below 90 these days!
I’ll put it this way, I’ve never tasted a wine rated 89 points that I thought deserved a 98, (maybe as high as 95) but I’ve had plenty 98s that were sub-80 as far as I was concerned.
Yes. That’s why this forum exists. Parker violently defending his self-branding as the ultimate objective standard against a real world of imperfection and subjectivity. Anyone who bought a wine on his rec that didn’t age well, anyone who questioned his preferences were conspirators with a devious/corrupt motive. His ratings were perfect and anyone who disagreed was wrong (inexperience, inferior palate - well, pretty much everyone had an inferior palate to his, obviously…)
I spent about a decade basing a reasonable amount of my buying decisions on a number of factors including avoiding wines rated 95 points and up. At that time most 95-100 point red wines were massive and over extracted. Michael Broadbent wrote a great article about tasting a group of 100 point wines that is excellent and worth searching out.
I still used the 100 point scale, and probably more so than today, but I bluntly preferred 89 points to 98 points enough that I stopped looking at the higher scores.
Yes, that means that my palate disagreed with the major critics using the 100 point scale at the time(WS and Robert Parker). And critics that I do align with more are far more common now than then.
But the statement that a 98 point wine is always better seems outside of reality to me. I’ll take 98% of well made Loire whites over 89% of the 98 point Napa Cabs every day of the week. But that is just my palate, but my palate(and Howard’s and Mark’s) are as valid as anyone whose palates align perfectly with the scores of critics. We can all use the system however it fits us or not at all as we choose. Easy to grasp.
I think you directed your response to the wrong person, Howard.
Dave was the one advocating Ray’s “Killer, Staggering,…” scale and saying the numerical scale was too fine for him.
I agree with you that it’s ambiguous if you don’t know how Ray or anyone else ranks their superlatives. That’s why I like numerical scales and have no problem with the number of numbers critics use on the 85-100 scale.
What’s refreshing with this thread in contrast with previous ones is the normal was a bunch of people with chips on their shoulders. Like they’d put too much credence in critic’s ratings and got burned.
Same. Another way to look at it is group blind tastings, where everyone ranks the wines. It’s just normal for my long-time group to have most wines getting first and last place votes. I recently got a copy of the Vintners Club TNs from1973-1987. Same thing.
I use the 100 pt scale literally. No nicey-nice. I’m also direct with my notes, so people peeking over my shoulder have been known to burst out laughing about how bizarre and spot-on some horrific descriptor is. I’ve had wines I tore apart as fundamentally terrible, with a score that truly reflects that, that others loved and rated first. That could be 53 vs 94 pts.
I don’t mean to push the thread too far off course, but back in graduate school, I wrote an article asking whether WS favored advertisers. I collected data on who advertised in WS by going through two years worth of issues and pulled down data on ratings and who got re-tasted from their website. The comparison group was Parker ratings. I found a statistically significant relationship between advertising and WS ratings. The difference was less than a point. I also found some evidence that advertisers were more likely to benefit from re-tastings (“best of three bottles tasted”).
That article led to some brief but spirited interactions with Tom Matthews. I pointed out that my main finding of slightly higher ratings was only problematic if you adhere to the idea that ratings are objective measures of quality rather than, for example, the idea that wineries that make WS-style wines are more likely to advertise in WS. He was adamant that WS ratings are objective, unbiased measures of quality.
I have to admit that I check out ratings when looking to purchase wine, both what critics post as well as individuals. That can work fine for trying new wines. For me, the best option is to try something in a tasting and when something really jumps out, well then it is time to back up the truck so to speak
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