The Winemakers Folly & Confusion of Critics

Making wines for the critics…

Opulent and lush with port-like fruit profiles, overstated alcohol, a lack of varietal accuracy, an absence of acidity and a lost sense of place.

Sharp green notes and lacking fruit in a thinly textured watery base with a pronounced citric acid flavor reminiscent of Vitamin C tablets.

I am not necessarily calling out Mr. Robert Parker or James Laube or James Suckling or Steven Tanzer or Allen Meadows or Wilford Wong or any of the hundreds out there making a profession out slapping a numerical score on a wine that they tasted. Be it a tasting with the bottle and the price in front of them, a blind tasting, or double, triple, centuple blind tasting, the scale for judging the quality of wine has become useless for the consumer.

86-100 points…… The current fad of scoring wines using a 100 point scale was initiated by Robert Parker and a friend. Robert Parker gets my respect without question, his recall is astounding remembering the wines he has tasted along with the score (within a couple of points) that he awarded the wine over thirty years of tasting, in addition to creating a publication that pays him well while remaining free of industry influenced advertising dollars. Still his palate is his own and the score on the wine is merely an opinion. An opinion that in a sense may have skewed somewhat over the years of being threatened by winemakers for allotting scores that did not help their wine sell and being shunned, at times, by entire regions in the world.

The 100 point scale is geared for North America where we are used to a grade school fashioned scale: 96-100=A+, 90-95=A, 80-89=B and so on. If one were to use logic here you would assume that the majority of the wines rated should be in the 70-79, C, or average rating. Realistically the ratings are severely skewed up an entire letter grade because wines that score in the average range do not sell as well and the industry does not like that. Those who fill their bank accounts with the funds of the industry must respond and as such wines keep climbing in ratings year over year to maintain sales, whether or not there is actually any improvement. I could go on about the flaws in a hundred point scale even though I do secretly use my own version of the scale for personal records, and I could talk about how you never see an add in Wine Spectator from a large producer where Spectator has awarded their advertised wine with 72 points.

More-so I find myself concerned for the very identity of varietals and regions being lost in an escalating trend to produce wines that produce scores. Mr. Parker announced this year that he would no longer taste and rate wines made in California allowing those that I lovingly refer to as his minions to cover the state. The hard part here is that a precedent has been set at this point based off of Parker’s taste-buds over the last few years, and this precedent will be followed by his minions and all of the copy-cat critics that are worried that not aligning with this precedent would make them look like they didn’t know what they were talking about.

93 Point Pinot Noir that is jammy and powerful… Pinot is not supposed to be jammy and powerful, it is supposed to be elegant and complex.

98 Point Cabernet Sauvignon that is port-like and pruney with silky tannins and overstated oak… Cab should be heavily structured and age-worthy, yes, but it is being taken too far.

Winemakers you are losing your identity and the identity of your vines! At the end of the day a wine should be varietally correct and a sense of place would be nice. The flavors that make wine a journey for the taste-buds are being destroyed by exaggerated ripeness and oak programs that are ridiculously aggressive all in the name of a score. I’ve got one for you…. Go to your vines, spend time understanding the art of Mother Nature before you start forcing your signature upon her. Allow the grapes to speak to you at optimal ripeness rather that exaggerating it’s voice. Seek varietal character while allowing the taste of your particular spot to shine. If you make five wines from five vineyards and they all taste nearly the same, and the same as the other wines in your price bracket, maybe you are exerting too much control over the natural process. Forget what the critics have to say and simply ask yourself: Am I happy with my wine regardless of the score that is allotted the bottle or how many medals it wins at the State Fair? When that becomes an emphatic “Yes” you might just have something.