Proprietor’s Note: Loyal vinapediacs will have noticed that we stirred a bit of controversy when we posted The Oenophliac, J.M. Garcia III’s, piece, 100-Pointless, on the over-oaked and over-extracted wines that make it into the 95-plus range. One veteran wine journalist from the Bay Area was so upset that he flamed us repeatedly, though he wouldn’t stand behind his words and state them publicly. Still, we answered this fellow’s charges and pointed out his errors, here. When Ted Talley, proprietor of Terra Firma Wines Company, also in the Bay Area, got wind of the controversy, he got riled, too. After reading the orginal piece and our response, he had this to say to our detractor.

Dear Sir,

The point is a question of probability — the highly oaked, overextracted wine is more likely to get fat points. There are very few areas of the world where both of these conditions exist in traditional winemaking. It’s the parvenues of the wine world that have made this the current fashion — and it’s just that, a fashion. Balance always wins, though it doesn’t always get the fat points.

There are very few wines that come in at above 15 percent that can stay balanced. Chateauneuf du Pape, Amarone, Sagrantino come to mind. But the list kind of stops there. And, back in the day (say more than fifteen or twenty years ago), these wines didn’t suffer new oak. Oak is a spice, not an ingredient. Too much is too much.

The problem is that wine is expensive and wrapped in ego. One doesn’t want to look like an idiot, so people gravitate towards the 94-plus point wines, and then that over-oaked, over-extracted sytle becomes the norm for what “good” wine is.

If it didn’t cost $80/btl for a good Village Burgundy from a good producer, you could go out and buy several bottles on a whim and try them and see what you like. But unless you have a fat wallet to empty out at your local wine merchant, it’s a minefield of labels out there and the wine that has sweetness (oak & alcohol & residual sugar) will be appealling and “good” at first sip. But can you drink the whole bottle over the evening and find something different in each sip? Does it change and unfold and reveal different aspects of itself? Or is the last glass the same as the first?

This is what I find to be the case with these fancy Brave New World (and here I include lots of wines from the Old World) wines. Great wine (not necessarily high-scoring wine, eg, “off” vintages of Rayas, Ferrando Carema, etc) reveals something new every time you go back to it.

Sincerely,

Ted Talley,
Proprietor,
Terra Firma Wine Company

 

Back in November, the Oenophiliac, J.M. Garcia III, posted a piece lambasting the 100-point wine rating scale as all but useless . Knowing the piece was bound to raise hackles — and loving a good fight — we sent out a press release on PR Web pointing to the post. The article was duly flamed, and in short order, by a well-known, veteran wine reporter who writes for some mid-sized papers located in the duller parts of the San Francisco Bay Area.

Without so much as a “dear sir,” he wrote:

About ten years ago or maybe more, Frank Prial, then the NY Times wine columnist, and a very savvy gent, who did not use the 100-point scale, commented on it. 

He said he did not mind it in the least because all it meant was that the reviewer who gave one wine 87 points and another wine 86 was saying nothing more than he liked the 87 point wine a little bit better.

Mr. Prial was right then and he is right now. Your rant misses the point, and essentially says that wine is not about small differences, when, in fact, that is exactly what separates one wine from another, one vintage from another, one maker’s Chardonnay from a particular vineyard from another makers’ wine from the same vineyard.

If small differences are of no import ot you, then you are missing the point. Wine is not a non-differentiable commodity like beer or soap and our enjoyment of it has the same characteristics that we bring to the differences between hamburgers or croissants or diamonds or tennis rackets.

They maybe be good, bad or indifferent, but they are distinct in their differences, and it is those differences that cause us to like one version and not another.

An interesting response, we thought. I wrote this intrepid reporter back and asked why he did not submit his comments through the Tasting Notes Blog so that all and sundry could benefit by his wisdom.

The writer responded, saying that his comments were for our eyes alone. He went on to note that: 

There is no such thing as a perfect ratings system, and it always strikes me as a bit silly when one reviewer or another or one observer or another proclaims to have found the “truth”.
 
As one of my readers said, “I don’t care if you use a ten chopstick system”. It is your judgment and comments that count. I can do the rest of the calculus for myself.”

At this point I was at a loss, as this was indeed the gist of Garcia’s “rant.” I began to suspect that this reporter may have read the press release but not the actual article. We wrote, saying, “If you actually read the post, you’d see that we didn’t claim to know ‘the truth.’ The author, Garcia, did however express an opinion. We’re allowed that, are we not?”

Mr. Veteran Wine Reporter then confirmed our suspicion: 

I will admit that I had not looked at the actual post when I responded. Instead, I was reading the rather more provocative press release.

That’s some wildly shabby reporting. No wonder he didn’t want to associate his good name with his comments. When I was in  journalism school, had I responded in print to a press release without actually investigating the story behind it, I would have gotten an instant “F.” I wonder what the editors at this reporter’s papers would think?

But never mind. Admission of poor reportage out of the way, he went on to slam Garcia again, anyway:

I have now read the entire post. It is more than opinion. It purports to tell people that wines over 90 points are not representative of place and grape.
 
Here is an actual quote: “To get 90-plus points you cannot make the traditional, authentic wine of the region with the native grape. You must ply the wine with oak, load it up with overripe and jammy fruit, wildly astringent with tannins, and heavy with alcohol until it resembles the other 90-plus wines and not the ideal Beaujolais, Montepulciano d’Abruzzo or Chablis. Which means you can’t pair up this wine with paella, or bucatini amatriciana. And that leaves you back where we started. ”
 
What arrant nonsense. Has the writer not heard of good Chiantis, great Chablis, mannerly Puligny-Montrachets?
 
Does the writer mean to say that Matt Smith’s brilliant, gold-medal winning Chenin Blanc is not representative of Chenin Blanc? What arrant nonsense.
 
I could go on forever with this. It is, of course, true, that wines with intensity will frequently score more highly than wimpy wines. But, the issues are balance, adherance to varietal character and drinkability, not oak, tannin or dried grape concentration. Intensity is not the same as excess. Otherwise, the lack of intensity would be the focus of wine worship.
 
And does the writer also mean to say that all wines with oak and tannin are inappropriate? I hope not, but that is gist of what is written.
 
So, I guess I disagree with the direction of the article. I appreciate your willingness to read my comments.
 
And I hope that your interest in wine will continue to grow, and that you will do as most of us do, listen to your own palate and taste wines broadly. No one, not Parker or me or the Wine Spectator or Mr. Garcia knows all the answers. Your palate will tell you what is right or wrong for you, and whether you like big wines or balanced wines or midsized wines, you will find that the best examples of all of them do adhere to the notions of balance, varietal character and drinkability — even if that drinkability is not always immediate.
 
Authentic wines of Bordeaux have never been immediately drinkable but they have been and remain authentic.

It would be unfair not to let Garcia respond. Here it is: 

The problems with the scale, for those who prefer large fonts and small words is that it does not convey what it says it conveys, and it is not useful to the vast majority of non-Gnostic wine lovers. Using that system, not all wines are, in real terms, eligible for the top scores. The commenter said: “Has the writer not heard of good Chiantis, great Chablis, mannerly Puligny-Montrachets?”

I defy anyone to show me a Chianti that has garnered a 95-plus point review from the major wine media that was not oaky and high in alcohol with masses of jammy fruit. Such wines have more in common with other Very Big Reds than they do with fellow Chianti bottlings.

Some have suggested that adherence to varietal character is what earns a wine a 95-plus point rating. We agree, up to a point…if the varietal is Cabernet Sauvignon, Chardonnay, etc.  Not so much if the wine is a Barbera or a Viura. One of the flaws of this scale is its glass ceiling for certain varietals. Put bluntly, some varietals, under the present regime, will never earn a 95-plus review if they stay in character.

Another comment chided us for suggesting – we didn’t – that all wines with oak and tannin were bad or somehow “wrong.” Which is, of course, not only drivel but drivel disprovable by a proper reading of the piece. Oak and/or tannin are only appropriate to some wines, and in turn these wines “go” with only certain types of food. If you start making wines with the aim to please the critics, you will eventually arrive at an appalling sameness which leads to a impossibly monotonous menu if your aim is to have a 95-plus wine which complements every meal.

Which is the genesis of the gripe. 

The naysayer missed the point. The point is that the 100-pt. scale is putatively an aid to consumers who — one presumes — don’t have time or resources to go touring the Loire in a Citroen with Oz Clarke. Therefore where it stands or falls is in its capacity to aid consumers in making an informed choice. The 100 point scale manifestly fails to do that. If someone thinks it does, I’d be thrilled if he (or she) were to explain it to me, in crayon and monosyllabic words. We can sit and discuss it over a 95-plus point bottle of Albariño or Brouilly.

My treat.

Although I don’t owe this fellow any professional courtesy to do so, I have elected to withhold this guy’s  name. (Though I will tell you that the names of two of the Bay Area papers he writes for rhyme with “slimes.”)  Futhermore, as a professional reporter, he ought also to know that words like “off the record” and “my comments were are for you only” are completely without meaning, legal or otherwise. “Never tell anything to anybody that you don’t want to see in print” is J. 101.

But such is the state of journalism today.
 

In his latest dispatch, The Oenophiliac, J.M. Garcia III, wrestles with the 100-point wine rating scale… and pins it to the mat. 

We have but one goal in mind: To demystify the world of wine for those who have, heretofore, been mystified by it. Surely a noble calling. Yet we were not the first to take steps towards this goal. Several pioneers, seemingly quite interested in both numerology and viticulture have preceded us. In their wake they have left tools and resources of varying degrees of usefulness. The most famous such tool is the now infamous 100-point wine rating scales used such heavy-hitters as Robert Parker and the editors of The Wine Enthusiast. Now, any vaguely sentient wine enthusiast has, by this point, begun to notice there have been rumors, whispers, meaningful glances and murmurs against the venerable 100-point scale. But you won’t get any whispers or murmurs about it from me.

Instead, you’ll get an unambiguous broadside against it.

Sexy, but Vapid
Sure, the 100-poin scale makes a lot of sense from a marketing standpoint. A “99-point wine” sounds pretty damn sexy. But the sad fact is that, like many things which seem sexy when viewed casually and from afar, it’s actually vapid and meaningless. (Think “Young Hollywood.”)

Better yet, this scale is so meaningless, on so many different levels, that it’s a veritable buffet for oeno-malcontents. If you would be so kind as to notice — or simply be so kind as to trust me on this — the number of wines rated below 70 by the major adherents of the 100-point scale is functionally zero. Why, if a wine ever received a 60-something-point rating, the vintner would probably be subject to prosecution by an international tribunal in The Hague. So, right off, we must admit this is really only a 30 point scale.

Big, Important Wines Only Need Apply
Compounding the uselessness of the scale is those wines that manage to sit in the 90 to 100-point step of the ziggurat. You’d think a wine that scored 97 points would be near the top of its kind. You’d also be wrong. The wines that hit that rarefied air are almost all “Big Important Wines” — Cabernets, Chardonnays, Bordeaux, the odd Rieslings… that sort of thing. Still don’t believe me? Let’s take a little test.

Go to your favorite wine publication’s website and click your cynical self over to the “search the ratings” section. Select a Beaujolais. Now ask the search to return only those Beaujolais with a score of 95-100. How many did the search bring up? None? Now try it with, say, Sauvignon Blanc. Or maybe a Rosé, any Rosé. Still nothing? Hmm. How about Chenin Blanc?

Starting to see a pattern here?

Cynics would proclaim that any wine that’s not hovering at 15 percent alcohol and tasting of a half-forest’s worth of oak stands no chance of the big score. Not I, of course, but cynics would. Seen from a different angle, this means that if you limit your purchases to 95-plus point wines, your cellar will look mighty monotonous. To make things more interesting, if you decide that you want to eat only what will pair well with such a cellar, you have a lifetime of ceaseless black-and-blue prime rib ahead of you (making said lifetime conveniently briefer) with the odd lobster for variety.

Reflect on that for a moment.

And while you’re being all reflective, add to the mix this interesting factoid: The greatest (authentic) Beaujolais ever will never score as well as a Great Big Cabernet from a half-decent year. Stop me if I am spouting lunacies. Then you have the problem that it’s usually one single person who assigns a score to a wine. You’re counting on that reviewer to not have had a fight with the teenage daughter the night before, to have gotten a good night’s sleep, to not have gambled away the milk money in Vegas, etc.

If it was left there, then this would be but a mere annoyance. But it’s not. You see, the average wine drinker, when graduating to more serious levels of sophistication, starts taking these all-but-arbitrary numbers as Gospel. When Chateau St. Nobody gets a 95, and its sales quadruple overnight, other winemakers in similar situations start looking like Uncle Scrooge when he discovered his next door neighbor picking diamonds out of his backyard. For these guys, the ticket to fame and lucre is simple: get a wine rated at 90-plus points.

By now you have spotted the flaw, haven’t you? To get 90-plus points you cannot make the traditional, authentic wine of the region with the native grape. You must ply the wine with oak, load it up with overripe and jammy fruit, wildly astringent with tannins, and heavy with alcohol until it resembles the other 90-plus wines and not the ideal Beaujolais, Montepulciano d’Abruzzo or Chablis. Which means you can’t pair up this wine with paella, or bucatini amatriciana. And that leaves you back where we started.

Do We Really Need All 100 Points?
Naturally, we are not going to dismantle, or even reform, the 100 point scale. (Yet.) Instead, let’s constrict the 100-point-but-really-only-30-point scale a little bit more. If the current scale throws out all numbers below 70,  let’s take it a step further and throw out all numbers below 85. And then, to show ‘em who’s boss, throw out all the numbers above 89. There. We have just hacked the unwieldy 100 point scale to its real range of 30 and then to its useful range of five. To make it even more fun, you can use symbols instead of numbers. You know: hearts, peace signs, My Little Ponies or, like Vinapedia, spades.

So let’s go back to the online ratings experiment, only instead of seeking wines rated 95-plus you seek wines rated 85 to 89. Better selection, right? But what else have you noticed? That’s right. Prices are also far more reasonable. In fact, if you want to have fun, contrast the average price of an 89-point wine to the average price of a 90-point wine. Then ask yourself if that extra point is worth the 20 to 45 percent jump in price.

Answer: No.

So there you have it, a clearing in the ratings jungle.

—J.M. Garcia III

The Oenophiliac, J.M. Garcia III, lights into the “judges” at the 2007 California State Fair Commercial Wine Competition for picking a real “winner,” and offers some valuable advice about who the real judge should be — you

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In the circles in which I travel, news broke out that shook the beliefs of many to their foundations. Not news about how Jesus actually became a management consultant and died at the ripe old age of 117; not news about how the sun actually revolves around the earth, not news about UV radiation being healthy. No. More stark than that. No, starker.      

Chas. Pshaw!
These are the news, in a nutshell: Charles Shaw Chardonnay (a.k.a. “Two Buck Chuck” in the patois of the street… ) won The Very Super Duper Ultra Prestigious Wine Competition, defeating wines from 873 countries, including some which cost more per bottle than three space shuttles and a lease return NASA camper van combined. ABC News posted footage of this amazing David & Goliath feat all over the Internet. Of course, they also had to get some sort of expert to clarify it for all the benighted people who don’t scan Vinapedia.net assiduously. Somehow, the expert failed to agree with the panel of judges that awarded Charles Shaw the coveted Plutonium Triple Crown of All Time Best Wine, Ever! and she said the wine was so atrocious that it was almost as bad as the wine that cost 60 times as much.

Here comes the caveat. I am not picking on any wine because it costs three bucks. I am an ardent believer in wines that give you value for money. In fact, many (most?) of the seriously food-friendly wines will weigh in at less that $20 a bottle, often less than $10-$15. The problem is that even if a wine is “spectacular for the money” there is only so much room for spectacularness in $3. So what gives?

What do awards really mean?
The crucial bit left out – until now – is the answer to “Yeah… so what’s this all mean?” I’ll tell you what it means. It means that those who place a great deal of store in what judges say are also placing a HUGE deal of store in a couple of semi-hidden, mostly nebulous variables. You read something about Wine X that says “Winner of the Platinum Medallion at the Palookaville WineFest!” and you are inwardly very impressed. You rehearse, perhaps, saying same in a casual, offhanded way to dinner guests… especially if it’s only one guest upon whom you have designs of the basest sort. You are assuming, of course, the judges at the 2007 Palookaville WineFest are all competent, intelligent, and experts in the field, at the top of their form on the day of the event. You assume the panel is substantially the same as last year’s panel.

You further assume there have been no glitches with scorecards, computing, counting, or sorting. Beyond this, you also assume that all the bottles sampled were both accurately representative of the wine and stored and served in such a way as to keep it so.

Some events are more transparent in this regard than others. The judges are announced with plenty of time, they are known quantities who themselves have credibility and expertise. Some events don’t bother or do a poor job of it. Your job is not to rely on any one award in your decision. I don’t state these things to slight these events or to impugn the their judges. Just to say this: Don’t assume that what a group of people (about whom you likely know little or nothing) decided about a wine is an immutable fact.

Train your palate… and trust your wine merchant
Even if the 2007 Palookaville WineFest chose a really magnificent wine like, say, the Chateau Sauvage Pipi du Chevre as their number one wine doesn’t relieve you of the responsibility to weigh the fact against other opinions including, most importantly, your own. This entails cultivating a relationship with your wine retailer, by the way. Yes, they all invariably dress in unflattering “aloha” shirts and those knockoff Panama hats. You’re not there to take sartorial advice, but rather, avail yourself of their expertise. If he (or she, I don’t discriminate) gets a handle for what your tastes are, what sorts of food you enjoy, your general budget then you are in a far more advantageous position for getting wines which will please you than using any other means of oenophilic discernment yet devised.

Above and beyond this, you may look at specific wine reviewers as a secondary source of guidance. While these reviewers — myself included — all may suffer from manifold flaws, including an appalling subjectivity, they bring a consistency to the table that is useful. Don’t fixate on a wine that got 98 points from Mr. Wine Q. Reviewer, rather focus on the reviewer first. Why? Because if you find a reviewer whose tastes parallel your own, then you can use those reviews to whittle down the near-oceanic quantities of wine available into a smaller quantity from which to choose… bringing us back to Aloha Tom and his wine shop and his invaluable advice. If most of the stuff that Mr. Wine Q. Reviewer suggests tastes to you as if it had been fermented through a weasel, then snapping up one he rated at 98 only means you will have paid exorbitantly for the opportunity to drink something your tastebuds will compare unfavorably to the renal output of most burrowing mammals.

Finally, there really is no substitute for training your palate. When you taste a wine, try to “look” for things. I remember vividly the first time I tasted a wine that had a clear, unambiguous “blackberry note.” I skipped and hopped merrily until my wife threatened to have me carted off. Once you have a palate that can taste specific aspects of a wine, you’ll notice you have less and less need for wines with awards.

After all, maybe some judges think certain wines taste best when spat out.

—J.M. Garcia III 

 

Last week, the Los Angeles Times reported, Nontsikelelo Biyela, 29, is now South Africa’s first black woman winemaker. Biyela, a Zulu, runs the cellar at Stellakaya winery in the Cape Winelands.

Noted the Times: “South Africa’s wine industry has long been run by white men who said blacks lacked tradition.” If it’s true that people actually said that—the Times does not quote a source—then that’s got to be the one of the stupidest things anyone in the wine world has ever uttered, even coming from the formerly apartheid state. It assumes that winemaking—a mixture of engineering, art and luck—is some kind of genetic behavior rather than a learned skill, like a beetle rolling a ball of dung. It’s like saying someone can’t grow quality rice unless he’s Chinese, or an American Indian can’t learn to ride a horse properly because horses aren’t indigenous to America.

It’s nonsense, as the legion of graduates from all backgrounds coming out of the U.C. Davis School of Viticulture & Enology, who with no previous tradition in the craft, produce wines that can compete favorably with wines from all the world, so ably demonstrate.

Well, whatever. Congrats to Nontsikelelo Biyela and I hope we’ll be able to sample her wines sometime soon.

To learn more about South African wines and wine-growing regions, visit the Africa page in the Regions section.

—Michael Mattis, Proprietor