Who do you trust?
You may have seen the NY Times article this weekend about the major wine rating systems:
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/13/business/yourmoney/13rate.html?pagewanted=4&ei=5087&en=604e8ee26f41a280&ex=1171166400&mkt=bizphoto
I will say that I am guilty of using the rating systems as a guide. I think in today’s wine world you have to use something because there is too much wine in the world to go buying everything to determine what suits your tastes. WineFetch is a good resource as well - using people like you and me to find the next new “cult” wine. But this is not what I want to discuss….
I think the most important paragraph of the article is the forth from the end. It discusses how certain grape varietals are favored by the ratings systems. The “noble” grapes of the world score higher on every rating scale. Can a Sonoma County Zinfandel ever achieve 100 points? Or how about an Italian Brunello? The likelihood is, probably not. How can you justly compare a first growth or a grand cru to a zinfandel without having any bias? So the answer might be to compare grapes amongst themselves, but then how do you achieve this in a blind tasting?
I’ve been doing a lot of blind tastings recently in preparation for my wine exam and I’ve gotten pretty good recognizing what I’m drinking. So these “tasters” at the ratings system must be able to know the difference between Lafite and a Heitz Cabernet or at the very least wines from different regions. I can tell the difference between Bordeaux and Napa, Cote Rotie and Australian Shiraz, etc.. So by definition there a bias as soon as that cork, or screw top, is removed to release the aroma.
So where does this leave us? We’re left in a world of ratings that makes any judgment hard to trust. So maybe we should ditch the numbers and just read the notes. Unfortunately, we understand that 95 is better than a 90 and we wouldn’t know if a “wine with luscious currant flavors” is better than a “wine with silky, velvety blackberry notes”. Do we need to know if wine A is better than wine B or do we just need to know if we’d like it. Maybe we just admit to the wine community that the ratings are flawed and then, we can create a system that will compare apples to apples and Zins to Zins.