Tasting Notes and Wine Scores Miss the Big Picture Regardless of Reviewer

Lost somewhere in the ongoing wine world debate about the validity of wine ratings and the validity of those wine ratings coming from enthusiasts who don’t have 20 years worth of tasting experience with historical antecedent is the simple fact that people on both sides of the debate are focusing on the wrong thing.

This is the topic that won’t go away—a bad rash on the wine glass of life: the “my palate or yours” notion of whether experience is a legitimate arbiter for the ability to competently provide a wine review, particularly when there are few barriers to entry to providing an opinion on wine.

The cacophony of who exactly is qualified to provide wine reviews smacks a little bit of our current healthcare reform debate.  Democrats nor Republicans want to find the essential truth.  Instead, they’d prefer to decamp to the fringes to yell at each other.  As related to wine, this is too bad because the essential truth is close at hand.

Unequivocally, it’s not about the score and it’s not about the tasting note, mine or yours, it’s the sensory evaluation that goes into that score and that tasting note.  Unfortunately, these days, the lack of true sensory evaluation across the board goes beyond a bad rash and moves into epic plague territory.

Dr. Maynard A. Amerine, the creator of the UC Davis 20 Pt. system should be rolling in his grave.  Designed in 1959 to be a critical evaluation tool for reviewing experimental student wines, the UC Davis system has been THE baseline for critical analysis for decades.

In my worldview, where I strive to be pragmatic, reaching across the aisle as it were, if you’re educated and/or equipped to do sensory evaluation than the rating and the tasting note is the logical end result of the evaluation.  I view sensory evaluation and the tasting note to be inclusive of each other and the end result shouldn’t be exclusive.

Make sense?  Basically, if you can analyze a wine, you can analyze a wine.  The end result should be a holistic view of the wine and NOT the distillation that equates to a score and a flavor descriptor.

The biggest problem the wine world faces with thousands of “citizen reviewers” isn’t the score or the experience.  No, the problem is nobody who reviews wines provides a sensory evaluation for a wine, including major magazine critics to whom citizen reviewers are respectfully looking to as models for behavior. 

We’ve moved away from sensory evaluation with the growth of wine criticism and the ensuing cult of personality it has spawned, not to mention a focus on points scoring.

However, I believe firmly that stripped of this “cult of personality” the fact remains that tasting notes, by and large, all suck.  Yours suck.  Mine suck.  Parker’s tasting notes suck.

They suck because they say nothing to nobody.

And, that’s a problem that can’t be solved by me or anybody adding 20 years of mileage to my nose and tongue drinking library verticals.

If all of the tasting notes in the word were nuked tomorrow, nobody would miss them.  They are 60 words of nothing staring into the deep abyss of emptiness because they don’t provide enough context.  Absent meaningful context, we get lazy—hence the rise of the score as the end-all be-all, almost a deductive offset because tasting notes are so bad.

Now, many will argue that CellarTracker, who just registered their 1 millionth tasting note, might be a good indicator of the validity of consumer tasting notes, but this just isn’t the case.  Absent a “cult of personality,” tasting notes only have value in that what people are really looking for when they go to CellarTracker is enough collective wisdom that says a wine is worth trying.

Four years ago, as published in Wine Business Monthly, George Vierra and a team of students at Napa Valley College presented a revised sensory evaluation form called the Napa Valley College 25-point score card.  This scorecard offsets some of the more technical deficiencies of the UC Davis scoring methodology which has limited consumer usefulness.

As excerpted from the article:

Taking the history, analysis and use of existing wine rating systems into account, a new scorecard was created by the Napa Valley College class. Because a rating system has to accommodate a multiplicity of functions, the NVC Scorecard is designed to allow the user to wear two hats: The wine can be objectively and thoroughly analyzed as is done under laboratory conditions, but the rating sheet also allows for findings that can advise the wine buyer and fulfill the historical role of the wine merchant. For example, the wine style, character and recommended aging windows can be noted as well as how the buyer might locate the wine and what it costs.

I like this model and I’ve used it in the past on this site.

Another model, as taught in a four day seminar called Discovering the Professional World of Wine at The Rudd Center for Professional Wine Studies, at the Culinary Institute of America in Napa Valley, is the process of evaluation using Body, Acidity, Texture, and Aroma as a baseline for the physical construct of the wine and then discussing Aroma, Flavor and Finish. If done correctly, this kind of review of a wine gives a holistic presentation of the attributes of the wine while not reducing it to raspberry, crème de cassis and vanilla.  88 pts.

If the wine community is really earnest about righting the perceived wrongs of the wine review, and the empirical correctness of who is giving those reviews based on experience, they should focus not on the granular and arbitrary nature of a rating with a couple of flavor descriptors, but instead focus on moving the conversation to the higher ground of sensory evaluation.  This higher ground also happens to be common ground, a place where healthcare debates and reasonable expectations about wine reviews can co-mingle. 

*Note*

This post trades on ideas presented by Arthur Przebinda from the wine blog Winesooth.  Arthur’s post called, “It’s Not About You, It’s About them” will be posted at Palate Press in the next day or so.  Tip of the cap to Arthur for his always well-reasoned approach to wine issues.