What would you do?- Part 2

[Wes_Barton]

@Anton D

@Wes Barton

It’s impossible to review wines objectively. Claiming preferences are merely linear is folly. There are different appeals in wine for different people, and an element that triggers a rare elation in one person or utter revulsion in another can be a single compound, out of thousands that can potentially be present.
Some wines will find very large agreement, others can find very divergent views, where both the “love” and “hate” are triggered by the same thing, or be directly related to that same thing.

There are reviewers who seem to like everything, which is useless. There are no reviewers, no humans, who are physiologically capable of objectively reviewing all wines.

As a reminder: We all line up pretty well with Parker on traditionally ripe Bdx. It was some of his own long time readers who he went crazy on, coining the completely off-the-mark term AFWE for, because they didn’t agree with his delusions of being some objective god. The metrics he used well to assess one type of wine fool him on another. That doesn’t mean those wines are bad, they just have a narrower appeal, and often offer greater pleasure to that subset of consumers. To him, his standards didn’t seem to have changed.

I really enjoy this conundrum.

There are definitely horses for courses.

The old Rolling Stone rule of thumb was, “Don’t send a Moody Blues fan the new Ornette Coleman record to review.”

Knowing one’s wheelhouse is important for a critic, as you mention with Parker. (As an AFWE-type, I don’t even really appreciate what he did to Bordeaux, but I get your jist!)

Ha. I remember our local entertainment weekly had 3 writers who regularly raved about one of the top local bands, but assigned their CD review to someone who detested the genre. The scathing review barely even touched on the content. I’m guessing not more than a few seconds were listened to.

Didn’t Rolling Stone regularly pan Led Zeppelin? And Rush. Cream went after Queen, iirc correctly from my brother’s rants and raves.

Anyway, I think it’s more that wineries picked up on Parker’s blind spot and exploited it. He values intensity, which is a good metric with traditionally ripe Bdx. Picking late and employing various tricks to deliver intensity, more intensity, fooled him. He could never accept that such wines had a narrower appeal. He couldn’t even accept the glaring evidence when one specific thread fleshed out that a wine he’d lauded fell apart badly early into his predicted drinking window. He saw some grand conspiracy of elitist moon men trying to knock him down, so they could steal his underpants or some other highly rational conjecture. But, that was just a run-of-the-mill TN from one of his subscribers who’d bought on his rec that set him off. Leading to several other bottles being popped and tasted by dozens of his subscribers.

[Wes_Barton]

@Bill S.

IMHO he should publish all scores regardless of high or low but … on the low scores (say anything below 85) he should explain WHY he gave it such a low score. This would allow readers to form their on opinions of the wine based on the difference between their palates and his. For example if the wine had the flavors he likes but was to earthy on the finish then he states as much and let his readers decide if they agree or not with his rating.

I have noticed on more than one occasion a wine getting say 88 pts from one source and 93 pts from another, so there is lots of wiggle room in ratings.

Many years ago Wine Spectator published a blind tasting of OR PN vs Burgs, with notes on each wine from both respective critics. Seeing the divergent opinions on some of the wines, and wrong guesses, was about as consumer friendly of an exercise as you can get. (This was a long time before CT.) But, it seems like being open and honest about how subjective wine appreciation is runs counter to the mags’ holding themselves up as some sort of objective standard that people need to turn to.

[dougwilder]

As a wine critic, I don’t see how you maintain credibility if you give wineries permission to opt out of reviews not to their liking. It breaks too many rules. Now wineries decide that anything under 95 is not acceptable, and your readers only read about 95+ wines from you. Independence is paramount.

If I decide to not write about something I don’t ask permission. I sometimes need to make these calls during layout. What benefit comes from three 85 - 87 scores, that will push the issue into another page (either at the end, or disrupting facing pages) and possibly create a bunch of blank space. I need to ask myself if including those wines is actually worth the extra 20 cents a page added to the cost of each hard copy. I have a fair amount of winemakers who subscribe to my publication and if they don’t like something, they rarely even mention it to me, and if so it is usually asking how I got to that conclusion; an intellectual conversation. Ultimately, wineries can choose to reprint whatever they want.