As I’ve allowed my online subscriptions to WA, Tanzer and Burghound to expire, I’ve recently found that I feel more comfortable checking Cellar Tracker for wine ratings/evaluations and drinking windows – especially the latter as it’s basically real time. Cellar Tracker obviously works best in these areas when the reviewer is someone you know and can rely on, and is of limited or no use for newly released wines, but I’m buying much less wine than I used to and drinking more wine from my cellar anyway.
Clearly, this isn’t an earth shattering revelation, but as Cellar Tracker’s use grows, it would seem to have the potential to be an increasingly reliable reference point for wine evaluations, drinking windows, and other wine-related matters, to the long term detriment of more traditional wine rating journals. Perhaps this is even more the case now with the arguable backlash against many things WA-related.
The wealth of notes is it’s strength to me. You look for people you align with or that have some skill evaluating wine and it can help you with purchases and drinking windows. I ignore the scoring.
Just a quick note, for believers and doubters alike, to say that I am listening and intently curious. CellarTracker will get to 1,000,000 wine reviews on Sunday or Monday. This year alone it will likely generate 410,000 or more reviews, and the trend is accelerating. There are 20,000 authors who have generated all of the current content, but there are millions of readers annually. My goal is to harness the millions to provide data as well. One of the things that is needed in the future is a better way for the community to indicate which content (and by extension) which authors are most helpful/trusted etc. That will be coming with the redesign later this year. These are building blocks for the future. Please also note that today you can tag individual authors as “favorites” or choose to ignore certain authors. My hope in the future is to use this to help the system show you the content that is most relevant to each user by default. Lots more to do here.
And of course while the pro’s might charge you $50 or $100/year for the privilege to see what is in their walled garden, my goal is that CellarTracker content should always be free and accessible to 10’s of millions of people. A very different economic model…
Thanks Eric – one thing I was wondering about was why you don’t have a “real name” policy to allow more easy identification of those posting tasting notes?
Many users do not want their real name associated with their cellar but might feel differently about their notes. Or you can keep your cellar private. Needless to say, it is a VERY personal decision for people and somewhat different from a bulletin board.
BTW, I received an email from Josh Raynolds who write for Steve Tanzer’s IWC. (Great lover of the Rhone and Spain and many other regions and a great writer!)
He (deservedly) took me to task for my somewhat flip comments above. I have asked him if I could reproduce them here or better yet asked if he would register and post (which I hope he does). I will wait to hear back before adding/responding.
To answer your original question, for mid to higher-end wines ($30+), I think CT scores tend to be a good indicator. For budget wines, there tend to be SO many scores, and the tasters seem to be so diverse, that it’s harder to draw a conclusion. Also, I have ~20 favorite tasters that I know tend to be pretty reliable in terms of their descriptions and whether they have similar tastes.
Because I tend to drink wine with dinner, I’ll always prefer a dozen notes, spread over time, by enthusiasts drinking (rather than “tasting”) a wine over professional reviews.
The pros, even Tanzer, overvalue weight, power and complexity because these are the things that impress when evaluating a 2 oz pour.
I’ll be surprised if Cellartracker–or something like it–isn’t widely acknowledged as the most influential source of wine information sometime within the next five years.
A suggestion on how to get more people to post reviews (which may already be part of your redesign…)
When I post a review and score, let me also create a report that shows what the most popular wines and reviewers with the same (or similar) score for that wine.
The more reviews I write, the more tightly you can hone in on reviewers and wines that match my tastes, which will give me a lot more incentive to write reviews - both good and bad.
If you want to get really fancy, you can layer on common descriptors across reviewers, not just scores.
This may incent professional reviewers to be more forthcoming about offering up their content to the site, since it will help people decide which professional reviewers they are most in sync with.
You can offer a service to ITB folks that tracks among different groups of tasters.
CT is getting better all the time. Can’t wait to see the redesign. What is the ETA?
The pro magazines, to me, are like any other magazine i might subscribe to.
It’s reading for knowledge/entertainment… just like if i read the Economist.
cellartracker i use to get a better spread of tasting notes/scores… Afterall, most pro review is a snap shot of one instance, one bottle, one moment in time, by one reviewer.
WA scores have and will sell wine, that’s why the shopkeepers prefer them over CT but I think that trend will change.
As an individual consumer, I will browse your shop for wines with my iPhone / Blackberry in hand and while once I would have looked at WA or IWC or WS scores, I now look to CT and see what the real people are saying about the wine. I’ve been on CT long enough to build up a good base of user’s whose opinions I trust and when they have said good things about the bottle I am looking at, I’ll buy that one.
Even more valuable to me is being able to refer to the notes when it comes time to drink the wine. Seeing a history of notes over time for a wine is immeasurably better then looking up one note written by a pro 5 or 6 years ago.
Horses for courses.
Cellar Tracker is obviously of no use if you want a tasting note on pre-releases. On the other hand a 10 year old barrel sample tasting from WA is of little interest, and that’s where CT scores. Of course, with CT you have to try and work out who can be relied on, and you can get very divergent views, which requires some thought.
I wish I knew what it was that bothered you so much about Cellartracker, Are saying you only trust your palate and have no need for a cellar management tool. Even if I didn’t find the notes useful a means of keeping track of your wines is always a plus. I find myself wasting my last hour of work many days just going through my account looking to see what I might drink that night, and I always stumble on something that I forgot about.
Using any review as a buying guide - professional, CT or otherwise - requires some thought. Taking a professional review at it’s face value gives you a 50% chance of liking a wine, IMO. You need to consider the critic’s palate and how their preferences align with yours. Nothing will send me running faster than a 90+ RP rating on a cheap Aussie Shiraz…
I believe CT has become the single most important source of information for a wine lover/geek. Watching a wine evolve via notes is fantastic, and finding even just one or two notes on obscure or older wines is helpful.
The B&H saga is a perfect example - if you just looked-up the RP notes on a '01/02/03 B&H wine that was tasted from barrel or just after release, you would see a very favorable review. OTOH, CT shows that these wines have MAJOR issues and probably aren’t worth much more than the recyling fee from the glass bottle. Two VERY different views - with one being much more relevant.
