Wine Spectator Article on 13 Value CA pinots. Sham!

WINE TALK
1

I had to laugh when I looked at the WS site today and I saw a link for 13 CA “Value” pinots. Needless to say I got very excited. Well, doing some quick math, the average bottle was just a hair under $45. Call me crazy, but I don’t see that as value. And we aren’t talking 96 point wines here. High of 92 and eight wines in the upper 80’s. And these are JL scores we’re talking about. I don’t know, I had to laugh when the headlines also mentioned these were wines that wouldn’t break the bank. True, they won’t. But they’ll put a nice little dent in the side of it.

2

I always laugh when a wine costing north of $40 is declared a QPR. If that’s a Wednesday night wine, what’s this person’s Friday dinner or special occasion wine?

I understand under-$10 is mostly industrial wines. $10 to $20 is usually more conscientiously made and/or rustic. Probably $20-$30 is where you see serious wines showing up. (But also spoofulated wines pretending they’re something double their price.) I suppose QPR means something different to everyone. To me, this means real wine for $15 to $25. Honest stuff with structure, depth and complexity, even if it’s a bit rough around the edges.

Others just define it as anything that costs less than something else it is as good as. A funny example is one blog, Wine Peeps, always rates Quilceda Creek a top QPR. Their reasoning is that it is being compared to Napa cult wines and top Bordeaux, so $100+ is a great value compared to $500 or $1000. I think that’s just their Washington colored glasses playing tricks on them. Same for $40 Pinots. Just because a wine is less overpriced than its peers, that doesn’t make it a good QPR. I wonder if critics actually had to pay for their wine instead of receiving samples if they’d have more realistic perspectives. Most are so entwined with the producers they’re supposedly objectively evaluating that it’s hard to trust them.

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I have nothing against the wines on the list. I didn’t post them, because the wines themselves aren’t relevant, but it’s just the concept that WS thinks that a bottle that is $50+ is a good qpr. I wish I had their deep pockets!

4

What deep pockets? They are either mailed samples or invited to taste at the winery. The wineries need them for scores. They need the wineries for content. They’re not consumer advocates (these days) as both wineries and critics require a symbiotic relationship to exist.

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I think people tend to use the term QPR in varying ways. Quality to Price Ratio. A wine can be $40 and still be a very good QPR. When Costco.com was blowing out their Bordeaux and champagne stock at throw-them-out-the-door prices, some of those wines became decent QPRs. Leoville-Barton is often a perennial QPR for Bordeaux IMHO.

edit: That being said, I usually don’t agree with Laube’s ratings, notes, and suggestions on pinots…

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Cary - I agree with you on QPR.

But for WS to put out an article with “value” Pinots and most are around $50 that’s not a “value” wine. At least not in the definition WS has defined it over time. Look at the section they call “Best Buys” or whatever they call it. Their definition of value wines has traditionally been in the $10-20 maybe $25 range. For them to put out these 13 with an avg cost of $45 (I haven’t read the article so I am taking that on faith) is a little ridiculous.

BTW - if Jim Laube really likes a wine, he will call the winery and ask to buy some before the scores come out. He often gets a discount…

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I was kidding about their deep pockets. I meant if that’s what they consider value, we don’t have a lot in common.

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QPR=Quality to Price Ratio.

I have no problem with saying a $100 wine is great QPR, 'cause it could be.

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Okay, perhaps we should throw out the term QPR. Value was the term they used, and sure it’s a subjective term at that. But I think an overwhelming majority of people looking at the article were expecting value in the $20 range because that’s been what WS has considered a Value Buy dollar amount.

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I can attest to this as I was visiting Vern from Toulouse a few years back, and in the middle of our conversation, his wife says, “JIm Laube is on the phone and wants to buy a case of the 05 Pinot”. He gets off the phone and tells me that Jim was just in the day before tasting wines for WS. I’ll bet he got the “super” interwinery discount. [wink.gif]

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Wholesale or after retail markup? [basic-smile.gif]

I’m sure there are theoretical instances where Petrus or DRC or something else quite rare and good for $100 would be insane QPR. But most of the time I look at the $100 range, even those being discounted to that point from much higher, and think the better option is 3 or 4 of a $25 or $30 wine. $100 is $100. I’d expect something that expensive to really blow my mind.

I tend to think gain in quality is marginal at a certain point. From $5 to $25, that’s usually indicative of huge differences in fruit quality, winemaking and attention to detail. But $25 to $125, I really don’t know if you get the same improvement on average for 5x increase in price. I’m sure the average $100 wine is better than a $50 wine. It’s just the growth in quality per $ is not so great in this range. Once you pull away the labels and personal taste comes into play, I suspect things get very tenuous.

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In B school (actually well before) they teach you that V= Q/P. Value IS the result of a price to quality ratio. It is only in this crazy economy that people equate value to cheap. It is not value that is subjective, it is “quality”. If we use a 100 point scale to measure quality (as some do) then even that is not subjective. And of course this is why Posner and others send out emails that scream “a 94 point wine for only $25!” An 86 point wine for $25 is no big deal.

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If you use V = Q/P, a $100 wine basically has not shot at being a good QPR.

A fairer formula would be something like V = Quality / LN(Price). Price grows quickly while quality grows marginally at a certain point. Still, it’s hard to get a true value at the extreme high end of the price range–unless you only will drink the best .1% of wines and compare this best .1% against its peers.

14

A fairer formula would be something like V = Quality / LN(Price).

Yes, of course. We are saying the same thing, you have just applied a natural logarithm to price (you could also leave price alone and normalize the Quality nominator). Bottom line, cheap does not equal value. And Value is still a ratio between Price and Quality.

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Oh lord… Do you really think you can make a formula for this? You’re using a SUBJECTIVE TERM as if it’s measurable (quality). Right there, you invalidate the entire QPR insanity. Hint - Math requires numbers, quantity isn’t a number. Sheesh.

And the WS is funny - no one outside of a few wine geeks will equate $45 for 750ml of wine as value. The term usually means high quality for a reasonable price with the added connotation that the price is at or below the average price most of the audience will pay for the thing being discussed.

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I’m not trying to do any statistical analysis or quantify quality. I’ll leave that to wine economist and critics. [basic-smile.gif] There have been studies done that assume a logarithmic dependence of scores on price, though.

The only point I want to make is that at a certain point price grows more or less exponentially with quality–however you want to define that metric. Makes sense as the better winemakers have the same tools, knowledge and excellent raw materials at their disposal. Usually why something is $100 or $300 has little to do with cost of production. So some quality judgment comes in that differentiates in some very minute way.

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Pricing is usually done (presuming you’re after max revenue) at the margin where charging more will drop demand out of proportion to the revenue gained from the increase. It’s not a quality judgement, it’s based on maximizing revenue. Of course, people can price differently for other reasons some economic, some not.

I understand the log issue - but unless you believe scores accurately and consistently reflect quality you can’t use math on something like quality. And if you do buy into scores, I think that they’re useless outside of one critic… unless you believe that a wine will always be scored the same across critics.

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Can I quote you on that?

Oh, I just did. [tease.gif]

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$5 please. That phrase is trademarked and copyrighted. Don’t make me go all DMCA on you… :slight_smile:

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I don’t buy into scores, nor do I believe there’s some absolute objective assessment one can make. Like I said, I’m not claiming to have some absolute mathematical model, though those who are interested in such things have shown correlations between professionals’ preferences and price. The study cited in the original Wine Trials actually showed a positive correlation between price and what professional prefer (though the anti-correlation between average tasters’ preferences and price was trumpeted more loudly).

You’re right on the pricing issue. The way I phrased it–as quality alone–is not enough. But I do think there is a correlation (not causation) between price and quality that weakens as price increases. While the ‘average’ $100 wine is better than an ‘average’ $50 wine, there’s a wide variance about the mean. And the ‘average’ improvement in quality from $50 to $100 is not as great as from $25 to $50 or $12 to $25.