July 4 2007
Since we’ve been talking about medals, wine ratings and such, I think it’s time to re-visit Justwinepoints.com
Back in March, when the wine blogosphere was doing a post-mortem (Good Grape included) on the train wreck that was WineX magazine, Tom at Fermentations did something of a redemptive post on WineX founder Darryl Robert’s penultimate act, Justwinepoints.com.
I’ve come to trust Tom’s opinion and leadership, so I mentally backed off my own vituperative response … and I subscribed to their weekly newsletter.
While re-visiting the Tom’s original post (found here) and then reading through the comments in which co-founder Jenna Corwin claims their dead serious intentions and not the satirical nature that Tom suggests (perhaps in good p.r. spokesperson mode he’s attuned to always looking for the silver lining), I decided it’s time re-review this thing.
As a quick refresher, Justwinepoints.com’s position to market is eyebrow raising, to say the least. As excerpted from their home page:
You never settle for less, and you’d prefer never to drink another wine that has scored less than 90 points. But who has time to filter through hundreds of pages of excess “information” during their ultra-busy day to try to find the right wine? justwinepoints to the rescue!
justwinepoints represents 20 years of research into why and how wine aficionados purchase wine. After examining and categorizing our data, we believe our easy-to-use, risk-free system presents wine reviews exactly the way you – the wine savvy consumer – want them: by the numbers, and numbers only.
So use justwinepoints to find the highest-rated wine without any distractions. Use our convenient, quick-access system to cut through the clutter of magazines and newsletters that spew descriptors as if someone might actually use them. Use justwinepoints to find that near-perfect wine before someone else does… or your lifestyle may be compromised by drinking sub-90s wines.
Um, okay. Pull this leg and it plays jingle bells. Except, unfortunately, just as Tom thought this was satire, I, too, want to think this is some sort of farce, but it’s not. They play it true which is cause for my blood pressure to rise to a near boil.
A friend tipped me off with a forwarded email from Sam’s Wines and Spirits that Justwinepoints.com is, obviously, reviewing wines for Sam’s, evidenced by the 95 point rating they gave to a Zinfandel, the 2004 Sobon Estates “Rocky Top” Zinfandel, more on this in a second.
As I was reviewing some files from last year, I noticed an advertorial that I had clipped, coincidentally, from Saveur magazine that talked about Sam’s and wine sales online. The brief article says, in part:
“Selling via email is great,” says Chris Durbin, head wine sales specialist for e-commerce sales. “We have the ability to send information immediately to a customer base of more than 33,000 people. We can sell 100 to 150 cases of a wine in a matter of hours.”
Durbin loves the email “perfect storm” of “a good price, a review over 90 points, and a wine that people are looking for.”
Understanding this context, quotes from last year, before Justwinepoints.com came on the scene, becomes important when you consider the email offer for the Sobon Estates that I received in the Sam’s email forwarded from a friend—which, typifies, to me, what seems to be a MANUFACTURED “perfect storm” so eloquently described by Mr. Durbin:
Durbin intros his passion for all things Tennessee football and goes on to say, “… being a sucker for all things Big Orange, when I first saw the Sobon Estates “Rocky Top Vineyard” Zinfandel, I knew that would be bringing a bottle home with me. Just because of the name. I am sure I did not need another excuse to bellow “Rocky Top” loudly and tunelessly, but I could not pass it up. I had no idea about the wine inside the bottle, nor did I even really care for Zinfandel, as I had never tried a good one. This one, however, did not disappoint.”
The email goes on to give a tasting note for the Sobon Estate and this parting word,
To top off all of that, Justwinepoints.com just awarded this beautiful bottle a staggering 95 point rating.
So, let me get this straight, we have a guy emailing a Zinfandel wine offering that admits that he loves a “perfect storm” of “a good price, a review over 90 points” in addition to noting, “nor did I even really care for Zinfandel, as I had never tried a good one …” and we have an online service dedicated to providing scores for a vacuous audience in order to, “use justwinepoints to find that near-perfect wine before someone else does… or your lifestyle may be compromised by drinking sub-90s wines” and we’re supposed to believe and buy this wine, however good, based on this garbage charade?
Maybe I’m starting to get old and steeped in minding the boundaries between right and wrong, but this just smacks me as wrong—manipulative, disrespectful of wine consumers and a complete error in judgment. Is it too strong of a statement to say that somebody in this equation is morally bankrupt?
Maybe it’s me that’s wrong and manipulative—maybe I’ve done a pastiche of quotes that isn’t representative of the situation, but somehow I doubt it.
I defy Justwinepoints.com to say that they proactively rate wines that ARE NOT sent to them. And, I defy Justwinepoints.com to say that they aren’t getting paid to rate wine for Sam’s, specifically. Should I find out that I’m wrong, I will gleefully fall on my sword, but I worry that I won’t have to.
So, my overall point is, just as we’re wondering whether fair competition medals are meritorious and the finer points of a wine rating system to use in the blogosphere, know and understand that people are absolutely snowing consumers with a tap-dance of bullshit that, ultimately, will paint a lot of people, perhaps you and I, with a broad brush of bad behavior—when these things blow up they don’t cut surgically, they cut gaping wounds and it will make our review of medals and talk of rating systems seem like girl scouts selling cookies compared to an ethical blowout of the entire 100 pt. system and its interpretations.
Posted in, Around the Wine Blogosphere. Permalink | Comments (10) |
Excellent post, and excellent comment by Stacy. Ratings are stunting our collective wine growth, for many reasons already stated. The key point I wanted to add here is that retailers are completely complicit in the ratings-driven vicious cycle. If they would stop quoting numbers to make their job easier, we’d all be better off. The particular case cited here—Sam’s using justwinepoints—is the ultimate disgrace. Every sane wine lover should make an effort to frequent retailers who still have enough pride in their own experitse to avoid shameless numerology.
That said (and good points made by all), how does the average consumer pick from one of the 400 Chardonnays on the shelf these days? Points may be arbitrary and flawed, but they do give guidance (albeit not always helpful) that reading 400 tasting notes will not…..
V
Thanks for commenting, all. In regards to Stacy’s comments about my duplicity, I really do think that wine reviews, the 100 point system and medal competitions are all well and good for the industry. I don’t even have a problem with somebody’s palate, like Parker, becoming so influential, because he has a certain “house” style that you can recognize and embrace, or reject, if you choose.
Where I draw the line is pandering, and in my estimation Justwinepoints.com is pandering to an audience and, potentially, providing ratings for wines that are not meritorious of the honor, relative to the benchmarks that have been set by Wine Spectator, Parker, Tanzer and others—they are truly a deceptive parasite preying on consumers that don’t know better—that’s my unproven suspicion, at least. And I do take issue with that.
Thanks again, all.
Thank you for the clarification. Your posts are thoroughly enjoyable to read. I understand your contempt of predatory reviews and certainly don’t agree with the methods behind the madness. But on the flip side as I said earlier, if the consumer picks up a wine that is rated a 95 and likes it, then is that actually predatory or is it simply a rating meant for those consumers that don’t know better? Perhaps there should be different levels of review - for the wine novice to the expert as our palettes seem to change with copius amounts of tasting? Two buck chuck was a great wine when I was just a casual wine drinker and a 95 would have been fantastic (or 98 as it has been placed at recently). Now, not so much. I completely concur with your observation that there are reviews that are placed on wines simply to better market the wine. Stated simply, it comes down to buyer beware but isn’t that true with most things?
We don’t taste/rate wines for sam’s or any other retail/wholesale company. Wineries send us their wines, and we taste them. Sobon has been sending us (Wine X) wines since we started in 1997. If Sam’s decides to use our ratings, that’s their decision.
And I find it ironic that you respect Parker’s and Spectator’s 100-point systems but not ours., since both of them have changed their scales at least times in the last 25 years.
Jenna Corwin
JustWinePoints
Jenna, what do you mean about Parker and Spectator chaning their scales?
As for respect for justwinepoints, sorry, but I have a real problem with your site. It defies the logic of wine itself. The idea that any media outlet - be it blog, website or publication - thinks such an multifariously interesting beverage can be reduced to a single number is antithetical to the very nature of wine and the passion it stirs in the people who like to talk about it. And as criticism goes, it’s downright lazy.
Even sadder is that by using your ratings, Sam’s has proven to be even more lazy.
This coming from the ex-editor of Wine Enthusiast… a magazine that inflates their scale in order to get free press via shelf talkers, etc.
Jenna,
I stand by my post. But, I’ll let you set the record straight.
I’ll make the same offer to you that I’ve made to others that have disagreed with my writing—feel free to write a guest post, I’ll post it unedited. For Justwinepoints I think it would be interesting for you to illuminate how your business and/or model monetizes, presumably, a living for you. And, in addition, it might be interesting to hear you expand on your position to market, the part that includes “...your lifestyle may be compromised by drinking sub-90s wines.”
All the best,
It might help to remember that I left the Wine Enthusiast almost ten years ago. They have churned through many mastheads and many incarnations of ratings-decorated “buying guides” since then, so your flip remark is only about a decade and 8,000 wine ratings off base.
More important: I my anti-ratings views—with a hefty dollop of wit, I hope—are laid out in many ways on two websites (wineforall and thewineskewer.com)
The real problem here, whether you want to admit it or not, is that ratings and dollars are connected. The culture of ratings has created an environment where points bring sales. That #-to-$ connection is at the core of Wine Spec’s and RMP’s power, and it affects everyone who dishes out numbers today.
Most important of all, THAT was the point of Jeff’s original post here… Numbers get USED. And they can get abused. If you don’t want to be on the receiving end of blog-based criticism of a real-world situation involving one of your “just points”, then perhaps you should just stop using numbers.
And, honestly, I still don’t know what you meant about Parker and Spectator changing their scales.
Tish
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License
Design by The Blog Studio
Print
I am getting so confused by all of the conversations about the merits of rating wines and medals. Even you tend to have opposing views. Two of your previous posts tout the merits of rating wines, both in review and competition. You even go so far as to promote a uniform rating system on the blogosphere. Perhaps you woke up on the other side of the bed yesterday when you posted this?
What I am reading on many of the wine blogs right now is that no one objects to a review or rating as long as they know it comes from a reliable source. OK I can see that. But how is an average consumer supposed to differentiate between one person’s 95 and another’s 3.5? They can’t. And furthermore, if they buy that wine based on the 95 rating and they like it, well then for them it was worth a 95 wasn’t it?
ALL reviews are subjective and ALL reviews are simply a person’s or panel’s opinion. We can disagree with their opinion or their palette and we as educated winos can reject their numbers, but the general consumer likes the ease and comfort that a number or award provides them. There will always be a huge percentage of the wine drinking market that will respond to the award or the number and will never read the full review. And there will never be a uniform rating system as long as reviews are personal opinions.
Actually, in this posting I am most disturbed by the person who has yet to find a Zinfandel they like. What a horrid thing to say. I hope Baccus comes down hard on his head.