Who's Score Matters Most

[JosephW]

Aggregate scores.

First of all, Decanter and Wine Enthusiast you can dismiss immediately.

Dunnuck and Suckling you deduct 2 points from immediately. Their score inflation frankly has done too much damage.

If Vinous, Advocate, and Spectator agree you can be fairly certain on the quality.

Other than that, read what your friends here post about the wine.

Or, you know, trust your own palate.

[Rahsaan_M]

@Mitch.J

As someone new here, out of the WBers, who are the fans or main people for Burg, BDX, and Barolo?

Burgundy has some massive ongoing threads, you can read through and start to calibrate your palate.

As with reviewers, you should never go out and buy something just because someone on here is raving about it. But, the advantage to this place is that you can have ongoing conversations with people over time and find out whose palate matches yours, and in which ways. Then you will have very useful sources of information with the added benefit of being able to meet in person and drink together!

Recent red burgundy vintage experiences

I thought it would be fun to talk about recent experiences to gauge how wines are drinking currently. I’m keeping this to red burgundy but would be interested in experiences with whites as well. Here are some of my data points: 1996: A bit of a mixed bag. I generally think 96s need more time to really blossom. Rousseau CSJ was reasonably open aromatically, as it was in 2022, but a bit tight in the palate with less expansive finish. DRC RSV was a bit tighter and not too generous at this ti…

[John_Morris]

@JosephW

First of all, Decanter and Wine Enthusiast you can dismiss immediately.

Dunnuck and Suckling you deduct 2 points from immediately. Their score inflation frankly has done too much damage.

If Vinous, Advocate, and Spectator agree you can be fairly certain on the quality.

Other than that, read what your friends here post about the wine.

Or, you know, trust your own palate.

My pallete doesn’t lean as heavily in the AFWE direction as John Gilman’s, but I find his reviews valuable because he’s about the only one who remains critical and isn’t afraid to give a low score. (Some of us are old enough to remember how Parker in his early days gave very low scores to lots of wines.)

The fundamental problem with most reviewers is that they rate everything 91 and up, and you their reviews are such blather that you can’t differentiate one wine from the next – in style or quality. Everything is well above average! I assume that most of their revenue today comes from subscriptions and licenses sold to distributors and retailers allowing them to be quoted, not from wine drinker subscribers. They are no longer consumer advocates.

The devaluation of “professional” scores is so great that I don’t give much weight to the critics even where Vinous, WA and WS rate a wine highly. Too often that just means the wine is made to a formula and has no real character or distinctiveness.

I’ve found a number of WBers whose palletes align with mine (Robert Alfert and David Bruecker come to mind, but there are many others), and put much, much more weight on their opinions than the critics.

[bwolff]

@Bdklein

You lost me at Who’s vs. Whose.

The tasting panel:

[John_Morris]

@JosephW

Dunnuck and Suckling you deduct 2 points from immediately. Their score inflation frankly has done too much damage.

I just got a store email with six or eight tasting notes from Dunnuck all with scores between 97-100. Spinal Tap’s amp naturally comes to mind…

[Jonathan_Loesberg]

Make me a palate on your floor

[Sarah_Kirschbaum]

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