I’m sure this topic has been thoroughly hashed throughout the ages of wine boards, but I thought I would reopen it given a recent observation.
I was over on CellarTracker reading a recent tasting note of a California wine in my inventory. I won’t name names, but someone posted a note and score to the wine that was substantially lower than the other 10 or so reviews on the same wine, some of them respected WB members themselves. In addition to the score being lower, I noticed the notes themselves appeared the opposite of most of the other notes.
I clicked on the profile and in reading this person’s tasting notes, it’s clear they are “Eurocentric” in their tastes as most of their notes were French, German, etc. When sorting on their notes, save for one U.S. winery in particular, the scores were all low-balled, which suggested to me this individual does not like most U.S. wines.
My question - why do people like this insist on posting notes, and in particular, scores, which trash these wines? I can understand a tasting note, but to deliberately score these wines well below the “norm” strikes me as just punitive in nature, with some agenda or a point to score (no pun intended).
I don’t view Cellartracker as a way of telling the world what I think about wines, rather recording my own thoughts. I’ll drink and post on any wine I taste, though it’s a while since I posted scores.
Scott - I think you are overreacting. Russell has a good point. You can “score” in any way you want to and if you’re keeping track for yourself, which is probably the only reason to score in the first place, your score is your score. I don’t really post TNs or scores, but if I did, some of them would be way out of line with others. For example, I don’t get the infatuation with Burgundy, so for me, those wines typically wouldn’t get the same love they get from others. I keep track solely for myself.
But who cares whether someone’s opinion is in line with anyone else’s or not? And why would anybody care about someone else’s score anyway?
Seriously. People post scores publicly for any number of reasons, sometimes for themselves, sometimes because they want to convey to others how much they like or don’t like a wine, sometimes to create a kind of image of themselves as being contrarian, passionate, cool, etc. in the same way hipsters wear skinny black jeans and black-rimmed glasses and other people wear wing-tips and Hermes ties.
I think the mistake is taking any of it seriously.
“Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in!”
This has been a pet-peeve of mine for many years. As a Cali wine drinker I have become friends with many whom make wine; small batches feed their families type of stuff. We are not speaking or Caymus on Mondavi here. I do think it matters to them, no, I KNOW it matters from some of my past conversations with a few. If someone wants to argue that point with me, they are: a) not paying attention or b) just don’t care.
The democracy of the tasting note is such, so be it.
If you can get past the idea that crowd-sourced scores have any value whatsoever, then none of this matters. This is just the first step on that journey.
Scott. I agree. I see it a lot. It would be best to post your note only instead of a note " I don’t really like X but drank this anyways…" And then a score of 75 on a clearly great wine for those people who are into that.
At the end of the day, it doesn’t affect me - I buy and drink what I like. I do get frustrated when:
I feel like it unfairly targets small producers who may benefit from higher average scores,
there’s a pattern to the poster’s scores that are consistently low by region, and
they’ve intentionally “declared” they don’t like a certain region, yet still post low scores.
Also, I suspect there are a lot of people who rely on CT scores when exploring new wines (I did and still do for new regions), so this skews the overall score which could impact sales.
One more thing, if after what I explained above you still feel “Who cares”, you also have no problem with Home Depot and the biggest lie ever perpetuated on the hardware buying public (pros for all your hardware buying needs. HA! Ever try and find those plumbing fittings in aisle 22?) and you then can move onto this thread:
We must do our part to protect the small and artisinal winemakers that rely on those scores to be TRUE and HONEST. Remember those qualities?
To some of the serious collectors on this board, the scores may not matter. But for most, they do…whether we like it or not, it has an impact. I’m sure that a lot of the success of CT, in addition to being able to manage one’s inventory, is the ability to peruse scores. We use scores on cars, electronic equipment, choosing colleges, etc. - it’s prolific, here to stay, and certainly means something. And to be clear, I’m not calling out someone who honestly scores wines low because they didn’t like them. I’m calling out the folks that have an agenda and go out of their way to score certain regions or types of wines low, yet somehow always find themselves back at a tasting where they feel compelled to drink the wines and low score them on CT (or elsewhere) afterwards.
I’m not sure if Eric throws out the high and low scores when calculating the average, but it would seem this practice of people ‘low-balling’ scores would make that CT data-point pretty useless.
my take is this; if we as a community only write reviews and/or give numeric scores to wines that we love, all of the reviews and corresponding scores will be positive thus rendering them essentially useless. variation of opinion is helpful for me, at least.
I have not, nor do I care. I would hope that a professional reviewer is free from those biases and punitive ‘points to make’ tasting notes so prevalent in cellartracker. He is probably accurate and surely fair in his findings. That is all anyone can ask for.
Matt, i completely agree, but this is not the scenario I’m describing. I’m talking about folks who habitually taste and provide low scores on wines they’ve gone on record as stating they don’t like. It would be like you writing tasting notes on white zinfandel (I’m just assuming you don’t like white zin - could be wrong!), and consistently scoring it low just to make some point. I’ve scored plenty of wines with lower scores, but I don’t go back to the same region over and over and continue to do this.
I think its important that people back up their scores or assessments on CT with detail. For me, reading that someone likes a wine just because it tastes good doesn’t do it. I want to know why you liked it because it may signal a characteristic that I dislike.
I also disagree with users who post public notes that are for personal use, I think this is a bit of a copout when it comes to having posted useless notes. Its pretty obvious when posting a public note in CT that it can be viewed by anyone and that you’re participating in a communal database of information. The onus is on you to post a well constructed, thoughtful note that others can use. If you’re posting “Went good with pizza” so you have a reference point, just add a private note.
I don’t know who you’re talking about. But how about John Gilman providing scores in the 60s to high 70s to modernist Bordeaux that he thinks are undrinkable (and to some of which Parker awards scores nearing 100 points)? Would you tell him that he shouldn’t write about those wines because he doesn’t like them?
In addition, it’s not like people actually spend lots of money on wines they don’t like just to slack them off on the internet. For example, I really don’t like concentrated, high-octane red wines. I hardly ever buy them. But I sometimes drink them because my friends like them and put them on the table. So if I think a certain wine sucks because there’s huge concentration, but not much more, should I not post a cellartracker note, simply because it’s about a wine that many people and professional critics regard as a great wine?
Be honest, if you like certain wines and you look at the Parker score of a certain wine and it says 94 points and the average cellartracker is 92 points, there are loads of 93s and 94s, but there’s also a 78. A single one. Don’t you look up the profile of the person giving it a 78 point score and try to find out whether that particular tasting note is maybe not the one that matches your personal taste?
hey, if the pros (cough, sputter) can’t get it right, why should anyone else be expected to?
If scores bother you (be they too low or too high), then yes, you’re taking it far too seriously.
Some people (scores) want to make a statement, some want to peddle wine/build their ‘brand’, some (read: most) don’t have a clue. Some are just having fun guessing. It’s imperfect, and easily ignored.
I have a very traditional (probably what you would term Eurocentric) palate. But I do like a number of California wines. To give just a few examples, over the years I have bought, enjoyed and cellared wines from Ridge, Montelena, Togni, Stony Hill, etc.). A post by someone distinguishing the type of wines I like from the types of more oaky modern style wines I do not like would be very valuable to me.
I will say that I have written any tasting notes in CellarTracker and do not give wines scores anymore.
I find negative scores very useful if they are from people whose palates I know align with mine. I would not want them to stop posting them.
I don’t find general CT scores useful at all, though notes can help.
The point of community note taking is not to boost wine sales but to provide as accurate a representation as possible of each person’s admittedly subjective take on a wine.
