Doubtful. He recently gave many 95pts to Domaine Bruno Lorenzon of Mercurey and put out a similar verticals tasting article like he did for Bouley.
Different strokes for different folkes?
Well, I think there are a variety of things that account for the discrepancy (and please don’t take this as a criticism of the other cited writers, as that is not my intention):
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tasting the wine at different moments: Thomas’ wines take a while to come together, and are made to taste good in bottle at age ten, not necessarily from barrel on e.g. Friday 25th October, or whenever a writer comes to visit. Given his long macerations and élevage, that’s perfectly natural. For this reason, Thomas stopped doing barrel tastings for review (just for interest, now) from last year, so we are all on the same page.
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different visions of Burgundy, and the extent to which a vineyard’s place in the AOC hierarchy imposes limitations on how good it can be. While I firmly believe that some sites are better than others, I do think that Burgundy’s intensely stadial hierarchy is as much reinforced as revealed by viticultural and winemaking choices (as an example of that, just today I heard a story of a winemaker of presses his Perrières, Genevrières and Bouchères grapes all together, and vinifies the wine to be labelled Perrières in a new barrel, the wine to be labelled Genvrières in a once-used barrel, and the “Bouchères” in a twice-used barrel). There is certainly room to disagree with this approach, and the sanction of history behind the best sites is considerable (something to which, as an historian by training, I am not insensible). But equally, my experience tasting and making wine leads me to think that the difference in reputation between Rugiens and in this case an adjacent parcel doesn’t hugely detract from the wine in the glass.
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different palate preferences. I actually think this is the least significant of the three factors at play, personally.
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I would say that you are right in the sense that I hope the reviews are provocative. After all, if wine criticism isn’t disruptive, encouraging people to try unfamiliar producers’ wines and question received opinions, what is its purpose? Ironically, if you ask any producer in the Côte de Beaune to list the top growers, there’s a strong chance the Bouley will be on everyone’s short list, and when someone is so admired by his peers (even those who don’t know him personally), I don’t feel especially exposed in taking a strong position. But, in another sense, I’m certainly not just having fun: I hope all my work in Burgundy these days is very deliberate, underpinned by a clear point of view and explicit priorities. To which people are, of course, entirely free and indeed welcome to dissent!
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They are all right, giving personal opinions about personal perceptions.
William, my ‘fun’ comment was meant to be good natured sarcastic tussling. No disparagement intended at all. I respect your seriousness of purpose and it is rightfully so. Cheers.
I think I’d agree with pretty much everyone here. To me the interesting thing is the differences in the notes (and one in particular) not the scores.
Slight thread drift … I have a fuzzy recollection somewhere of thread or article about ‘normalising’ different critics’ scores. Can anyone help? Not a huge deal as I go more by words than numbers , especially in relation to expectations for producer site vintage, in spite of being a retired actuary!
Further thread drift. Responsible Restaurant critics base reviews on multiple visits. Guide Michelin takes that to extreme. But wine scores can be sometimes based on a single tasting , perhaps even of a work in progress
A lot can happen in three years ![[snort.gif]](/uploads/db3686/original/2X/b/bdc3944606213c4dca6c1169cf0a166c8bc4f8c9.gif "snort.gif"){kind=small}
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How can we get these guys in the same car, tasting out of the same bottle, and shooting the shit?
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Lastly, “same bottle” is not technically true. They are all tasting the same bottling, but not the same bottle. As we all know, in some cases, there can be quite a bit of difference between bottles of the “same wine”.
sure, but an 88 versus 97?
You certainly put a lot of stock in scores, Shan.
My hat’s off to Neal Martin for giving his actual blind score from 2018, even though it was an outlier.
William’s is an outlier, too, but he tasted the wine three to five years after the others. Some wines show much better young (even from barrel) than they do later. Others improve.
To me it’s an unusually wide range but not shocking or dismaying.
It happened from time to time with Parker vs Suckling, for example. I’d be shocked if it were the same reviewer’s score.
Pretty cool to find a recent example. Makes trying the wine a little more fun.
You know, i don’t really think this is too unusual (particularly with the 3 year time difference). 2 weeks ago, we were in Walla Walla and visited a Winery who’s wines had received scores as high as 97 from a well known reviewer who covers Washington. We tasted a pretty full line up, including the newly released new line high end wines they have just introduced. Everything for me was–meh. the best wine I might have scored 90 if I was a scorer, so that would give you scores in the 80’s that someone else had given a 97 to. We were tasting outside because of COVID, and there was a light breeze, which is often a problem for me as a taster. My conclusion was that the wines were not as good as touted, but also, it was just a bad day for the wines. So it happens–sometimes the wines, or the reviewers just have a bad day, and sometimes everything is perfect.
Bottle variation and half a decade can make lots of difference. That’s why we talk about how wines “show” and not how they “are” — or at least we should.
This is one of my favorite threads ever about critics and scores. No ad hominem attacks, no pleas to special universal truths (that nobody agrees on). Thank you all.
I subscribe to nearly all the reviewers listed above precisely because I find value in the diversity (or agreement) of opinion. I’ve read hundreds, or even thousands, of reviews by each of these guys, and have a decent sense of what their tastes are relative to mine. Triangulating among them is very helpful when deciding whether to overflow my full full full cellar even more to try something new, or pop for some bottles that are on the edge of my price comfort range. Or just to keep an eye out for a new producer that I might stumble across in a restaurant.
I certainly do expect some amount of score correlation. But this example shows that is a bad expectation and I should not place as much emphasis on a professional critic’s note unless I really understand the critic.
I do think CT scores and notes are helpful. Now that I think about it, if CT had 20 tasting notes on the wine I would defer to CT as telling me which critic was ‘right’ on their notes and scores. A larger number of tasting notes can shed a directional view on a wine, and individual notes can be quickly scanned for history (e.g., what does the author usually like / drink / score in the same band). I find CT’s simplified tasting notes can be helpful with more core information (need for air, red vs. blue vs black fruit, prescence of alcohol, perceived acidity) versus many professional notes which can veer into haiku.
That said, we should be able to get more consistent information out of notes themselves, no? I thought we could post stock into at least this? If the “arc of development” throws off professional reviewers… how can one ever interpret the notes? I don’t understand many of these critic’s palates so I started threads… one major takeaway was that Neil has a British palate… and yet here is William writing a contrary note in the same British accent… which one is the proper Brit? (I imagine answer will be none/both/flawed poll!).
This thread brings to mind a friend who got much higher ratings on some of his first wines than he thought they merited. A few years later and they’d evolved to the level that critic had predicted. What it looks like here is a few critics (perhaps Allen Meadows excepted) didn’t have the basis to predict how well the wine would evolve. Then, 3-5 years after those various reviews, a different critic comes along, tastes an evolved wine that’s now showing really well. And, while we don’t see an earlier review from him to compare, he does have an explanation as to why it would be particularly difficult for people to assess this wine when young. So, the question is how would those other critics rate this wine now?
Forever ago Wine Spectator did a blind tasting pairs with their Oregon and Burgundy critics. Not only did they often enough get which was which wrong, but their ratings differed by as much as 15 points on some wines. That’s same bottle, same time, not different bottles of an evolving wine 3 or 5 years apart. Again, with this particular wine William explained why it wouldn’t show well young. I’ve been at blind tastings where what you might call “controversial” wines had a much wider discrepancy, with some absolutely loving the wine and others finding it undrinkable. And, it’s typical with 8 wines that 6 will get both first and last place votes. (As in about 80% of the time.)
Many years ago, I made some spreadsheets of Parker’s scores of the same wines over time. As you’ll see, the absolute average (plus or minus) change in his scores for 1985 California cabs from 1987 to 1995 was 5.7 points, and it was 4.3 points from 1988 to 1995. Most of the shifts were downward.
There were similar shifts for the 1986 Cal cabs over time.
And this is just one critic.
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The shift in Parker’s scores were smaller for 82 Bordeaux – an average absolute change of only 2.45 between 1985 and 1995. But people who bought Branaire in 1985 when he gave it 93 points were no doubt disappointed when he rated it just 87 five years later.
Note that he only gave Pichon-Lalande 94 in his first report on the vintage, but later upped that to 99.
There was a lot of inconsistency in different lots of the '82 Domaine de Chevalier, which explains the huge downgrade here. Some were dilute; others were excellent.
