Online wine retailers

[Roy Hersh]

My pet peeve is when I see online retailers (see marketplace, my post today re: K&L) using tasting notes from Parker, WS and others that date back between 1989 (25 years old!!!) and 2000. To me, this is a sad statement, because what's being represented is an absolute farce when it comes to presenting an impression and rating that is even close to being relavent. Maybe I am too close to this topic to offer an objective view point. So I will turn it over to your collective Port wisdom to share your thoughts on the subject.


Thanks!

[Moses Botbol]

Why even bother with a review if it's not recent? Do most retailers at least date when the review was taken?

[Mads Barnkob]

My best guess is that they will keep the one with the highest rating, from a business point of view that will sell more wine from the average customer thinking in rating/cost ratio when comparing wines.

[Tom D.]

Agree completely Roy. This gets to the whole issue of critics who publish scores on release and only sporadically follow up with additional notes.

The old wine critic system is geared toward the buzz of new vintage releases, and that is one of the old system's huge problems. This is also why certain good blogs and CellarTracker and other alternatives have the critics chasing their tails now to try to innovate and avoid extinction. I love it when Suckling, for example, publishes a Bordeaux retrospective, but such tastings of older wines just have never been a consistent priority for those guys.

One of the things I most appreciate about Roy is that he is continuously tasting and posting notes for older Ports, and that's what makes his database of notes so useful to me. It's not all about trying to make a splash with hype about the latest vintage.

[Roy Hersh]

One of the things I believe could help the process, would be to have the date of the tasting of the wine or at the very least, the date of publication of the note included at the beginning or end of every pro tasting note. At least that way, there would be full transparency and the reader would not be fooled by an anachronistic, useless TN and score. Would good does a 10 or 20+ year old tasting note do for the current consumer except if they can see that in comparison to a more current note. Does that make sense?

[Mads Barnkob]

I agree on having a date on everything, also taste notes, data without date is without value as it has lost its context in history.

I would like to see a central service, something like the pricing graphs on WS, but just for taste notes, which all retailers could implement for free, so get writing a script for reading out all the TN in the world and set them up as graph. Comparing different rating methods will be a problem and also retailers would properly refuse to show bad ratings, then rather not show anything at all as many do.

Something like this, made it from Croft 1991 from FTLOP TNDB

tngraph.jpg (191.63 KiB) Viewed 2472 times

It might not be the best example, but it could give a good view of when the curve starts to bend downwards.

[Andy Velebil]

Agree completely Roy. This gets to the whole issue of critics who publish scores on release and only sporadically follow up with additional notes.

The old wine critic system is geared toward the buzz of new vintage releases, and that is one of the old system's huge problems. This is also why certain good blogs and CellarTracker and other alternatives have the critics chasing their tails now to try to innovate and avoid extinction. I love it when Suckling, for example, publishes a Bordeaux retrospective, but such tastings of older wines just have never been a consistent priority for those guys.
.

I agree. And when most do due retrospectives they are not blind. IMO, that often leads to score creep in bottles that ended up not doing so well over time, so they don't look bad in giving it such a good review earlier.

[Roy Hersh]

Mads,

Another problem which could make averaging ineffectual is that bottle variation can be huge with Port wine. Even things like the "dumb phase" that many Ports can go into, would make things look out of whack. It already happens on CT and our TNDB.

[Eric Menchen]

Yes, give dates please. I often wonder about glowing reviews on very old wines.

Not all old reviews are worthless, in particular the negative ones. If you tell me that a wine is over-the-hill when tasted in 1994, that is still good to know today. It probably hasn't improved. Of course I see this more in CellarTracker reviews (which are all dated) than in retailer re-pasted reviews. And while I tend to consider that many CellarTracker reviews might be of poorly stored bottles and by people that might not appreciate a very old wine like I do, a preponderance of reviews citing age does carry weight. Now, do I buy the 1971 Chateau La Gaffeliere or not?

[Andy Velebil]

Yes, give dates please. I often wonder about glowing reviews on very old wines.

Not all old reviews are worthless, in particular the negative ones. If you tell me that a wine is over-the-hill when tasted in 1994, that is still good to know today. It probably hasn't improved. Of course I see this more in CellarTracker reviews (which are all dated) than in retailer re-pasted reviews. And while I tend to consider that many CellarTracker reviews might be of poorly stored bottles and by people that might not appreciate a very old wine like I do, a preponderance of reviews citing age does carry weight. Now, do I buy the 1971 Chateau La Gaffeliere or not?

+1
As for Cellartracker, I generally read the reviews and toss out those at both far ends of the spectrum and those who just post scores. I then get a sense from reading the notes how it may be. Of course, I'm also careful to weed out those reviews and scores where they mirror perfectly a professional reviewer (lots of those on CT) as I am quite sure people are simply regurgitating what said reviewer said.

[Moses Botbol]

Yes, give dates please. I often wonder about glowing reviews on very old wines.

Not all old reviews are worthless, in particular the negative ones. If you tell me that a wine is over-the-hill when tasted in 1994, that is still good to know today. It probably hasn't improved. Of course I see this more in CellarTracker reviews (which are all dated) than in retailer re-pasted reviews. And while I tend to consider that many CellarTracker reviews might be of poorly stored bottles and by people that might not appreciate a very old wine like I do, a preponderance of reviews citing age does carry weight. Now, do I buy the 1971 Chateau La Gaffeliere or not?

+1
As for Cellartracker, I generally read the reviews and toss out those at both far ends of the spectrum and those who just post scores. I then get a sense from reading the notes how it may be. Of course, I'm also careful to weed out those reviews and scores where they mirror perfectly a professional reviewer (lots of those on CT) as I am quite sure people are simply regurgitating what said reviewer said.

Yes, I do the same. Look for repeating themes and go from there. If "corked" is on every other review, I will heed that with caution.

[Bradley Bogdan]

I definitely mentally filter the cellartracker reviews, just as I filter Laube and Parker's words when I read them as well. Reviews are only helpful when you can interpret what they mean to you, and including dates is a big part of that to me, personally.


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