Hmm! Let me remind you of the last line of one of your previous posts. “ What are you having trouble grasping here?” if you don’t like snotty, I’ll go with condescending or downright rude.
I am not going to repeat what I said previously. I am just happy that you have found critics whose palates align with yours, and a 98 point wine is always going to be near perfect. It is my fervent hope that you never have to go slumming and find yourself drinking an 89 point wine.
I’m close.
-1 - Don’t drink again
0 - would drink again
+1 - hope I drink again
The goal of an evening or week or year or collection is end up positive.
One poster states that he knows the types of wines he likes and types he doesn’t, implying that he buys, drinks, and appreciates wine accordingly. Another poster equates said vinous philosophy with “ignorance is bliss.” Fascinating.
Yes it is common sense. Which is why I wrote it. I was not the person who said ALL wines rated 98 points are better than ALL wines rated 89 points. YOU were the person making the comment that defies common sense. So far, what you have written is completely self contradictory and defies any logic, so I am going to stop playing. Live in your ignorance. I don’t care.
Mr. Wilk does seem to have a habit of pissing people off.
In my mind, scores are like statistical models… All are wrong, but some are useful. In order for a score to be useful, the primary things I need are:
90 is the new 84
I believe AFWE is the expression you are looking for, there.
Ratings can be useful. They are not objective, they are not universally reliable, and they are not for everybody. As with most things, it’s the middle that is correct. 100 grains of salt, indeed, except you get 50 of them just for playing, and that really seems to bother a whole lot of people. Personally, I kinda like salt.
A joke in the industry is once you understand what it takes to get a wine bottled you agree that effort is worth 50 points.
I LOVE this thread.
Arguing about wine rating scales is one of my favorite examples of Sayre’s Law!
That is awesome.
A favorite old wine buddy and I once thought we had it figured out…
50 points if the wine assumes the shape of its container and 35 more if it pours well and then the critics take it from there.
I am thankful that we have choices of professional scores and a diversity of amateur notes available today. Even with the challenges and imperfections, I benefit from the stream of data that shows up as numbers, offering individuals’ opinions. I try not to confuse them with facts or a prediction of the future truth. I don’t have any malice towards those I disagree with and am glad we all don’t like the same wines.
With their track record and volume of reviews, professional’s ratings are easier to map against my own taste, timeline, and use case. It is pretty easy to understand if a professional tends to serve the restaurant crowd of young wine drinkers or has a connoisseurs’ taste for aged wines such as Willam Kelley. It is easy to adjust for some of the inherent biases, such as the biggest scores being for power today over grace, and besides John Gilman, most critics drinking windows are more attuned to selling wine to drink soon, than cellaring wine to enjoy later. My most useful reviews are when critics taste verticals, and I can learn about a wine’s life and the variation of vintages. I especially enjoyed Michael Broadbent’s The New Great Vintage Wine Book from 1991, where he shared his notes on vintages and tasting wines over decades. Michael used a 5-star scale.
Barrel sample tasting seems even more speculative (a good example are Neal Martin’s tasting notes for 2006 Latour a Pomerol on robertparker.com - As he said, “Boy oh boy, has this wine not duped me after an indecisive barrel showing” and his score went from an 84-86 to a 94). That, of course, is an opportunity for buying producers with a good track record whose wines don’t show well early.
One big noise creator in Cellartracker that needs to be weighted is the condition. I assume a fair amount of bad Cellartracker reviews of older wines come from storage and shipping issues, especially in more delicate wines from cool climates. I think for Burgundy, Oregon Pinot Noir, and Grower Champagne, being careful about how the wine got to your cellar will consistently improve your results versus the crowd.
The early drinking window taste or bias, depending on your own desires, is rampant in CellarTracker. I find it easy to ignore as noise the numerous drink up now notes for five to ten year old artisanal wines. I am sure others find my drinking windows annoyingly long.
Finally, there is a real divergence from the 100 point scale if you view wine and champagne as an enhancer to social gatherings and meals, instead of making it the main event. The music I choose to play for a dinner party is different than when I attend a concert, and I expect that people scoring a big wine at a tasting will not match what I want to have electrifying my dinner party conversations. That said, I am glad there are wine obsessives on Berserkers who are willing to share their experiences when they line wines up on center stage. I especially take notice when Mark G gives an older wine a high score.
I agree that textual descriptions are more meaningful than a point score.
When I look on CT and there are a bunch of scores and no text it is not at all helpful to me.
The 100 point score system is really a 25 point because almost no wines score below 75 and the huge majority are lumped between 88 and 90.
I think a 5 point scale like the rest of the internet uses is more useful.
When I rate wines for myself at a tasting (I vaguely remember what those were), I like the letter grade scale as they mean more to me from my schools days than the 100 point scale. With pluses and minuses added, it is essentially a 10 point scale. (Since below C- there is only D for shitty wine …well I do use F for corked or premoxed or otherwise flawed.)
That seems easier for my brain to handle.
Though realistically I usually don’t give ratings unless we are asked to rank our favorites.
Though I guess the 100 point scale is essentially a 16 point scale…85-100.
I do like the concept of adding in some “marker” for a wine that hits above its class or price point, as Jasper Morris does…I believe he assigns stars in addition to his 100 point score, so that a village wine that is truly superb for its classification might get 5 out of 5 stars even though it received a 91.
For me and my more simpleminded approach, I might just put a star next to my B+ if the wine was $25 and a great deal.
As to looking at critics’ reviews, I hate the descriptors…all the aromas and tastes. I skip over them, as they are pretty meaningless to me, and I do not recall ever seeking out or writing off a wine based on those. Since I was mainly buying red or white Burgundy or domestic Pinot, I was more interested in alcohol level with finishing heat (to avoid), acidity, tropical in WB (to avoid), complexity, structure, balance. I do want to get a sense for how much the critic liked the wine, so some scale is helpful in that regard. So I have no gripe with them using the 100 point scale, 20 point scale, 10 point letter grade scale, whatever. But I would be just as happy if they used a scale like “magnificent, great, excellent, good, OK, fair, poor” or “loved it, meh, hated it”.
this is my issue with the way wines are scored right now, and its kind of the same I think as previous conversations in the best burgundy vintage thread and your can a Bourgogne be great thread. I don’t love that kabinetts and bourgognes have a handicap because of a system that names them not necessarily based on how good the wine in the bottle is, but solely based on where the grapes were picked or what time of year. why could a kabinett NOT be a transcendent wine? what’s keeping a village Chambolle-Musigny from being mind blowingly good? as far as I can tell- nothing besides the fact that knowing its “only” a Chambolle-Musigny the taster automatically assumes the next step up must have another level reserved for it.
In my experience, a large part of the professional critics and a significant part of the amateur critics on CT do give higher scores to lower hierarchy wines if it’s deserved.
Re professional critics: The thing is, a Grand Cru Burgundy can often be a less enjoyable than a Bourgogne on a given day just because of their respective maturity profile is completely different. A 20XX Bonnes Mare will for sure take a longer time to drink at its peak than a Bourgogne from the same vintage. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that the score for the Bourgogne at that moment has to be higher. Many critics do lock at all technical aspects of the wine and their score is an assessment of how good the wine will be once open or once mature. And even though the Bourgogne is more “fun to drink” right now, it will never reach the heights of the Bonnes More once it is ready.
They do give us an assessment of the future quality (and that’s what we pay them for). Imagine if they wouldn’t and only tell us 25 years later (with a new, much higher score for the mature Bonnes Mares) “you should have bought that En Primeur”… that wouldn’t be very useful (on the other hand Jancis Robinson has a thriving business and she pretty much does that, so no rule without exception).
Do you feel that most critics understand and predict future development accurately?
I don’t read or pay attention to most critics. I tend to pay attention to the critics where I have confidence in their abilities whether professionals like John Gilman or William Kelley or board members like you.
I think the most important part of any rating scale is who is doing the ratings and whether their palate aligns with yours. Pretty much everything else (whether one uses the 100 point system; an A,B,C system, a system of stars or whatever) is noise.
You mad or something? It is pretty clear the 100 point scale is very useful if applied correctly to your own tastes by a critic you researched or align well with.
That point is consistent and hardly contradictory. The 100 point scale is far more useful than this thread.
How angry would you say you are? On a scale of 0-100?