Wine Scoring - Is it essential OR distracting?
So, this video from Whitney Adams gave us some pause. We have built a Wine Blog and a Brand around tasting wines and scoring them. There is a lot of legitimate points here, but fundamentally the scoring should never be the focus. It is an aspect of what we taste but we are not you nor do we have your palate. You might love Sauternes or have a passion for Sparkling Wine and we respect these wines immensely and will drink these wines regularly but we would be hard pressed to present either as 100 point wines because our palates aren't shaped to "love" these wines blindly. We will like them, maybe even a lot, but our personal preference and biases will always play a role in how we score something.
Now, we tend to be fairly hard-minded when it comes to scoring wines so if we do score it in the 90's it's really something special in our minds. Typically, for us, a wine registers in the 80's most times but that is OUR take on things. We agree in principal with Whitney that the score from Wine Spectator or some other body is just a guide as is our scoring, but you need some yardstick to say that this wine is good, great, or awful to US (PS - very few wines are awful). If you taste 10 wines, which one did you like the best? Guess what, you just scored that wine anecdotally. It's human nature.
Back to Whitney's argument... She's right, the score doesn't matter and wine makers should never chase scores as it's a fool journey. It's great to get a score in today's wine world but here's the thing, if you make the best wine you can to match the terrior of your vineyard, good things will happen. Getting marketers (like Chris) involved in the wine making process just mucks it up. The wines should speak for themselves and THEN let the marketers get involved... :)
The scores and medals will come. Until then, we'll try to provide context to the wines we taste which will sometimes include a score.
Agree? Disagree? In the wine biz and have an opinion? We'd love a comment.
Keep on tasting,
Chris & Shannon
Now, we tend to be fairly hard-minded when it comes to scoring wines so if we do score it in the 90's it's really something special in our minds. Typically, for us, a wine registers in the 80's most times but that is OUR take on things. We agree in principal with Whitney that the score from Wine Spectator or some other body is just a guide as is our scoring, but you need some yardstick to say that this wine is good, great, or awful to US (PS - very few wines are awful). If you taste 10 wines, which one did you like the best? Guess what, you just scored that wine anecdotally. It's human nature.
Back to Whitney's argument... She's right, the score doesn't matter and wine makers should never chase scores as it's a fool journey. It's great to get a score in today's wine world but here's the thing, if you make the best wine you can to match the terrior of your vineyard, good things will happen. Getting marketers (like Chris) involved in the wine making process just mucks it up. The wines should speak for themselves and THEN let the marketers get involved... :)
The scores and medals will come. Until then, we'll try to provide context to the wines we taste which will sometimes include a score.
Agree? Disagree? In the wine biz and have an opinion? We'd love a comment.
Keep on tasting,
Chris & Shannon
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