Keeping Score

A lot of people have asked how I plan to sell my wine. I have no good answer for that at the moment. I'm thinking direct pitches to sommeliers in Los Angeles, I'm thinking a series of private tastings (my hairstylist,er barber, runs a chic salon. She's offered to set up some wine parties. Don't laugh. Yet.) I'm thinking grass roots internet, lots of blogging. I'm thinking.

 

Or maybe I could submit it to a wine publication and get a super duper score and be sold out for the next 5 years up front.

 

Wine scores have taken over wine marketing and fine wine sales among a huge swath of the "informed" wine buying public in the U.S. This fact is regularly bemoaned by the industry but the hard fact is that most every winery and winemaker would give (insert body part here) for a high score from one of the tastemakers. I will soon fall into that category, and I'm saying take any body part as long as I have a spare.

 

When it comes to reviewing and rating wine for the American market there are two publications that tower above all others in influence: The Wine Spectator and the Wine Advocate. The Wine Spectator is a large format glossy magazine that features, along with an extensive list of capsule wine reviews (each accompanied by a score), all sorts of articles about wine and food and to a lesser extent traveling to places that have wine and food.

 

The Wine Advocate is a newsletter, and almost no one refers to it as "The Wine Advocate" when discussing it. They refer to it as Robert Parker.

 

Robert Parker is one of the most polarizing figures in the wine world. An ex-attorney based in Baltimore, reportedly with his nose or palate or something insured for $1,000,000, he spends his time traveling to various wine regions and wineries, tasting wines and reviewing them. He then writes them up and assigns them a score on a 100 point scale. He apparently achieved some renown by touting the 1982 vintage of Bordeaux as superb, an opinion that was at odds with the conventional wisdom that greeted the release of the vintage. He was later proved correct and his star was in the ascendant. Besides reviews he has published several books on wines (including annual recaps of reviews that date back several years).

 

It's important to note that by now The Wine Advocate has several writers and tasters besides Parker, but it will always be Parker who is synonymous with the publication and its reviews..

 

The 100 point scale has fomented severe consternation over the years. Briefly, a wine that scores from 95 to 100 points is considered outstanding, at the very top of its class. 90 to 94 is excellent. 85 to 89 very good, 80 to 85 good. Below 80 is not recommended for much more than cooking, so really it's a 20 point scale. The Wine Spectator uses the same scoring system.

 

Very few wines get scored below 80 and very few get a "perfect" 100. A brief glance show around 130 perfect Robert Parker scores as of June 2008, the vast majority from France and California (there are also some Aussies, Germans, ports and Italians and even the odd Tokay, a rich and legendary Hungarian dessert wine)

 

The simple fact is that a review from Parker can make or break a winery, the general demark being 90 points (although if a wine is low priced 85 may get it over the hump). Wineries decry the monolithic and quantitative 100 point scale but if their wine scores over 90 you can be sure they will feature that score in all of their marketing and communications. You can also be sure that the price will go up quickly.

 

The wine scoring process has become so ingrained in the culture of wine retailing, marketing and collecting that sadly, many wines that do not score over 90 points become market laggards, for no good reason. I have been in many wine shops; in most of them the high scoring wines are displayed prominently, and many customers tend to seek them out (I have been told by friends in the wine business that some customers will not even consider a higher end wine that scores less than 90 points). Naturally the high scorers sell out quickly, and if you can find a wine that scored over 95 points you will see a marked up price. Of course you can get one at auction. As I was perusing Parker's 100 point wines I took a glance at the Sine Qua Non 2003 Syrah. It's still available, at a number of online auctions, at a median price of around $800. This wine was probably priced at $40 or $50 on release although once the score came in the release price went up quickly.

 

Parker is regularly reviled for mainly 2 reasons:

 

1)     It is unhealthy for one person to have so much power over tastes, trends and pricing.

 

And

 

2)     He has an affinity for a very specific type of wine, i.e. big blockbuster reds bursting with fruit and tannins and lacking, perhaps, a subtle or food-friendly touch.

 

 

Both of these objections are legitimate, but they are not the whole story. Parker's tastes are what they are and an experienced wine buyer will always trust a group of critics that share his or her taste. It does tend to be true that Parker likes the big boys. I attribute this to two factors. Firs, he really does like them, plain and simple. But perhaps more importantly, this is a man who tastes a lot of wine.

 

From my own wine tasting experiences I know that after a while a certain amount of palate fatigue sets in, and it takes more and more oomph to cut through that fatigue. Thus a wine that early on may have been just plain over the top with overripe fruit and high alcohol just really hits the spot later in the game. It's important to note that wine tastings do not involve food, and the tasters usually spit out the wines. Thus the wine tasting and reviewing scenario does not resemble a typical scenario for fine wine i.e. having a bottle with a meal. I recall a quote from a well known winemaker (I forget who) along the lines of "I make my wine to drink with food, not Lafitte".

 

I've learned this lesson many times. Recently I was at a wine bar in Solvang, and doing an extensive tasting (as is frequently my wont) of mostly pinot noirs. Since I don't spit, I was not only experiencing palate fatigue but also a degree of lapsed judgment. The counter guy brought out a zinfandel from Paso Robles, a huge fruit bomb with over 16% alcohol, to contrast with all those elegant pinots. It tasted great; all that fruit and alcohol cut right through. I bought a bottle but when I subsequently served it at a nice dinner it didn't mate with the food so much as squash it.

 

The main objection to Parker is not so much his palate but his power. In fairness to the man, his influence frequently seems to be a source of embarrassment to him. After all, he's really a guy who loved wine and wanted to write about it. World domination was not on his agenda. Corollary to the criticism is the charge that winemakers have altered their style to get high scores. Honestly I can't vouch for this is one way or another, but I can say that there are an awful lot of wines out there and it can't be that difficult to find one in a style you like. They're not all big ass reds.

 

The Wine Spectator (WS) is the co-conspirator as far as the wine score tyranny goes. WS started as an industry newsletter; in the 1990's it evolved into a large glossy magazine and is now the undisputed heavyweight when it comes to North American wine magazines.

 

I used to read WS regularly, and pored over their wine ratings, which make up several pages in the back of every issue. I became burnt out by the magazine's style and disillusioned with the whole rating system.

 

WS is so in thrall to their wine scores that any reference to a wine in an article will always be accompanied by its score. For example an article about travel in Rome may have a line that says "we stopped in a charming café and had a delightful 1991 BlaBla Brunello (89 points)" This becomes very off putting and they do it relentlessly. The scores are paramount and no wine is discussed without its score in parentheses. Vintages in different regions also get scores. It's all quantitative all the time.

 

Like any subjective system, the WS scores are imperfect to the point of occasionally being badly flawed. One of my favorite wines of the past few years was a 2001 Kali Hart pinot noir, a low priced wine made by Robert Talbot, a well known chardonnay and pinot noir specialist in Monterey County. I bought one on a whim in Monterey and it was so good I ordered a case from the winery, which was discounting it to something like $10 or $11 a bottle by the case, what I saw as an unbeatable value. Every single bottle was outstanding and by the end of the case I was trotting out the Kali Hart for fancy meals that would normally have called for a more prestigious wine.

 

Why was this delicious wine, from a respected producer, so low priced? I learned later that WS had scored it 78 points, essentially delivering a death blow to the wine in terms of market acceptance - a score below 80 points might as well be zero.

 

When I was an avid reader of WS I did purchase wines based on scores, but this practice lasted a short time. The wines were disappointing more often than they should have been, they were hard to find and naturally no one does you any favors on the price.

 

Now, most wines scored highly by WS and Parker are without a doubt good wines, and most wines scored low are not. This is an immutable fact of wine reviews in general. Wine reviewers are generally conscientious and feel that what they are doing is an important part of the wine world (there are a few publications that seem to have a different agenda and give suspiciously high scores). And you are not going to be able to taste most wines, especially pricy and/or rare ones, so if you're curious about a certain wine or genre reviews and scores may need to be your starting and/or ending point. But the lesson I have learned over and over again is that acquiring wine based on reviews (numerical or otherwise) is both limiting and not much fun, and to my friends who shop solely on the basis of scores I say go out and taste before you buy.

 

The wine magazine I read regularly is Decanter, the leading wine mag in Britain, modestly described on its cover as "The World's Best Wine Magazine". I like reading British magazines in general, as the level of erudition is usually higher than their American counterparts and I also get a point of view from a different part of the world.

 

Truth be told, Decanter is a fairly stodgy publication, and they cater to a certain kind of British clientele, the kind that presumably buys "claret" and owns a cellar which ages fine wines for many years before drinking. The Brits are obsessed with drinking older wines, something that bemuses the French, who make most of these wines that are laid down to age. Decanter is also a rabid Robert Parker hater, and their various writers and columnists will take various potshots at him from time to time. I find this great fun and I believe much of it stems from envy - the fat cats of British wine journalism want to call the shots and set the tastes rather than the American upstart. Jancis Robinson, a frequent contributor and probably the leading female wine writer in the world, has a long running feud with Parker. Oddly enough, this feud apparently originated over a single bottle of wine: the 2003 Chateau Pavie. Robinson gave it 12 out of 20 points and called it "portly-sweet late harvest Zinfandel". Parker gave it 100 points. They've been at odds ever since, as various critics lined up behind one or the other (usually based on which side of the Atlantic they were on) and the whole thing turned into an argument over whose philosophy of wine was "right".

 

Hugh Johnson, another well known wine writer who contributes to Decanter had this to say about Parker in his memoir: "Imperial hegemony lives in WashingtonBaltimore... Taste in the past was largely a matter of harmless fashion. In American hands, it feels more like a moral crusade. Robert Parker deals in absolutes, and castigates those he sees as backsliders." and the dictator of taste in

 

Decanter is of course rabidly against the "American" 100 point scoring system. When they rate their wines it's on the 5 star scale, with ones and fives being very rare. Ah but Jancis Robinson gave the Chateau Pavie 12 out of 20. What's going on?

 

In Britain a 20 point system is used. Additionally many reviewers will assign ½ points so it can even be a 40 point system. Like the 100 point system the bottom section of the scale is meaningless (once you get below about 14 points the wine effectively has a stop sign affixed to it). While Decanter only assigns stars, these are converted from the reviewer rankings on the 20 point scale. Many British publications don't do the stars but actually just assign the point totals, kind of like the ... 100 point system! So the tyranny of the quantitative may extend to our friends in Britain as well.