WS is not irrelevant. If it can generate 2200+ views in about a day on this forum, then people around here think about the mag still. I don’t read it anymore, giving it up a while back in exchange for the power and my own value I place on Cellartracker.
I totally agree that WS is not irrelevant at all - it probably moves more wine than most other publications these days. Perhaps not here, as others have pointed out, but it’s not to be ‘dismissed’ as a ‘has been’ in any way . . .
Cheers.
WS is the only review publication that actually moves units if you get a good score/article/etc. Not Advocate, not Vinous, not Enthusiast, and not Dunnuck. So I would say they are certainly relevant to the other 98% of wine consumers who are not Berserkers.
And my guess is that it is relevant to many on this board even if they don’t admit it . . .
I should also clarify my previous statement, in that WS is the only one relevant to moving units on a direct to consumer basis. I don’t have much insight into the behaviors in the wholesale market when reviews/news come out in the various publications.
John - the way it used to work with wholesale is when the NYT came out, they moved wine that week. There was no staying power though. When the WA came out, and when Parker was writing, it moved wine. You’d get orders immediately and they’d continue. It was found in many wine stores, so a lot of owners followed those scores pretty closely. I always thought that was the main market for the WA.
The WS moves a lot of wine this time of year because they start counting down the wine of the year. The rest of the time they didn’t generate a lot of cold call orders like the WA did but they really helped if you were showing wine and could mention that you got a pretty good score on this or that. No other publication really mattered. If people wanted shelf talkers, you could provide them from just about any source, and that could help retail sales, but they didn’t move wholesale purchases.
Today I would suspect that for the mass market, WS is the only wine mag that has any influence. There’s a lot more influence coming from social media, friends, and crowd-sourced info like Vivino. I don’t understand the use of Vivino at all, but it’s amazing how many people I’ve seen the past few weeks standing around in stores looking at it.
As to those who say the WS has no relevance on this forum - wait until the WOTY. There will likely be multiple threads.
I am not sure why people are complaining. I am sure that they hit every pinot made by Jackson Family Estates. Should be enough for the readership of the WS.
There is a precise grand total of exactly one Pinot Noir from the Santa Cruz Mountains, California’s greatest terroir for the grape… 2014 Black Ridge, rated 89. I have never heard of them, no surprise even though I am a Santa Cruz Mountain fanatic. Not only no Rhys, but no Mount Eden, Thomas Fogarty, Alfaro, Windy Oaks, Soquel &c.
Overall ratings are pretty low, I assume because so few California Pinots are thick and alcoholic and sweet.
Dan Kravitz
Good call Dan. I find the whole pop and pour reviewing of wines a major flaw. After 50 you probably will rate the high alcohol wines higher as Parker has done for the last 15 plus years. ![[stirthepothal.gif]](/uploads/db3686/original/2X/f/f40faec63ca1018898a40805efbf9f0066a3d205.gif "[stirthepothal.gif]"){kind=small}
Commercial post: My company sends samples to the Wine Spectator. Some are reviewed, some are not.
I agree that the Wine Spectator continues to have a great deal of influence on the American wine market. I have no idea if they give preference to advertisers in selecting what to review. They claim to taste blind and I have no reason to doubt this. However I find some of their choices of what to review bizarre. I am not complaining about their reviews of Kirkland, Layer Cake and Toad Hollow. However I am complaining about their omissions of many superb producers. I find the lack of reviews for Mount Eden particularly bizarre; to me, if not the equivalent of excluding Domaine de la Romanee-Conti from a Burgundy review, it’s at least like leaving out Armand Rousseau or Roumier.
In his early days, Parker would buy wines to review as nobody was sending him samples. I would think the WS could afford to buy California Pinots with track records that don’t submit samples.
Dan Kravitz
I think he stopped buying wines to review sometime back in the 1980s, probably the early 80s. By the end of the 80s he was reviewing at the various chateaux and with the various importers. And you couldn’t get your wine reviewed until you’d been around for a few years, and he rarely gave you great scores right at the beginning. it was all hands on and personal, which would have been perfectly fine except that he kept saying he bought wines and tasted them blind. Once that stopped being true, he should have acknowledged it.
Absolutely the WS could afford to buy wines that aren’t sent in, but why should they? If you don’t want your wine reviewed because you think you’re beyond them or you don’t need them or you’re selling out everything you make, why should they go out of their way to generate additional publicity for you? The group of people who buy your wines are going to do so anyway and they’ll either celebrate the reviews as validating their good taste, or slam them as being ignorant and misguided. Either way, they’ll keep buying the wines and the magazine gets nothing really worthwhile out of it except that they’ve satisfied a lot of people who don’t buy the magazine anyway.
I found that explanation thoroughly unsatisfying Greg
That’s a low blow. We can have a discussion on the differences between a larger company, and a small family owned producer. But Jackson has a history of buying very good, small producers, and allowing them to maintain their quality and identity, while giving them a nice financial and organizational foundation. Siduri and Copain are two such producers that I followed from the start, and I still have great respect for. Every Jackson employee I’ve talked to has been positive about the company, the work environment, the increased opportunities they have. Mostly, the quality of wines they produce has not suffered in the least once folded into the company. If you want to substitute Southern, or maybe Constellation, for Jackson, that might be a stronger point.
Are you sure you have current information? I am fairly certain Wells along with all of the original members of copain at the time of purchase have been replaced with people from within Jackson Family Wines.
Greg, serious question with no sarcasm or hidden agenda. If they are not covering a region with authenticity, complete with the the main producers in the region regardless of financial incentive (as you and I mentioned), what is the purpose of their article and/or magazine?
Wells retired and sold. Ryan Zepaltas took over as winemaker. He’s an excellent Pinot maker and understands what Copain is about. (Not aware of anyone else there leaving, and not sure if Wells is consulting there or not.)
Sure, but he’s from within JFW (Siduri, but still). Sarah, the Copain Assistant winemaker, was out a while back as well.
Joe - I can’t answer for WS - you can ping Tom Matthews or Kim Marcus on the WS site to get a more detailed and perhaps relevant answer, but I can tell you what I think based on what people I know have told me happened to their articles when published. Those articles were edited to fit into the WS mold. That’s not a bad thing or a good thing - all magazines and newspapers do something similar.
Kim has been writing for them for a long time and probably has a good grasp of what they want, and how long the article can be. Clearly they could devote an entire volume just to producers of Pinot Noir, discussing all of their vineyards, clones, experiments, etc. But that would be unwieldy and wouldn’t really fit into a magazine that’s designed to give a broad overview. Laube wrote books because there’s no way he could fit everything into the articles.
Moreover, if they do an article that purports to list every producer in a particular region, it just becomes a database. Then next year what do they write about, or do they just update the database?
Rather than do exhaustive articles, they generally like to focus on a trend, on a vintage, on a handful of producers they consider “representative” of whatever point they’re trying to make. They do general surveys and once in a while focus in detail on a single producer, who often makes the cover story. They mentioned producers on the far west coast, but I don’t think they mentioned Peay, which is at least as big a story as Rhys. And they didn’t mention Wild Hog. Or Halcon. Or at least I didn’t see mention of those.
Instead, they covered some broad themes with some examples of producers, and listed the wines they’d rated. I would say that was the purpose of the article and the magazine.
But I may be dead-ass wrong! ![[cheers.gif]](/uploads/db3686/original/2X/0/0ff9bfcdb0964982cd3240b6159868fbdf215b1a.gif "cheers"){kind=small}
I don’t really like the wines from Jackson but that was not my point. My point is that Jackson Family Estates is very aggressive in marketing and I am sure that they make sure (and pay?) to have all their wines included on a list like this. My guess is also that WS gets a lot of advertising from Jackson Family Estates and includes their wines on a list like this to protect their advertising revenues. Who do you think gives more advertising dollars to the WS, Rhys or Jackson Family Estate? Do you think advertising influences this list?
What was the Meiomi score? 93 points? Oh sweet sweet candy…
We’re off topic, but: Wells and Jackson parted ways. I’m not privy to the details, but I don’t believe it was because Jackson wanted to install it’s own team. After all, Adam Lee stayed on with Siduri for some time, eventually giving way to his assistant Ryan, who had been there for years before Jackson entered the picture (and AFAIK, Adam is still involved at Siduri in at least a consulting capacity). Many of the staff still at copain in various capacities have been there since well before the Jackson purchase.