Comments on: Wine Judges and their Discontents

By: sedimentblogThe Sediment Blog

sedimentblogThe Sediment Blog — Fri, 29 Jul 2011 14:58:02 +0000

“Two famous critics produced different opinions much of the time. Hard to know what to think or who to trust.”

No, it’s not, actually. Don’t fall into the trap of believing there is one, objective and “correct” opinion of wine. The individual tastes of those particular critics are well known, and we all know what we will get from, say, a highly rated Parker wine. It’s not at all surprising they have different opinions – both of them can be trusted, absolutely, to put forward their own, subjective, individual opinion.

Just know your critics!

By: Wine Curmudgeon

Wine Curmudgeon — Thu, 07 Jul 2011 13:36:22 +0000

I judge a fair number of competitions, and there is no doubt that judging is incredibly inconsistent. But is that caused only by the very human failings of judges? Or is there a flaw in the competition process, which is often overlooked in the research and in reports about the research? The mega-competitons, where judges do 100 to 200 wines a day, make consistency that much more difficult.

Steve Menke at Colorado State is convinced that the process can be made more consistent, and has worked diligently to do that at several Colorado wine competitions. One method (which, unfortunately, only works at smaller events): have the same wine judged by two panels, and not just one. This helps even out out the results.

By: tom merle

tom merle — Wed, 06 Jul 2011 21:08:04 +0000

Instead of using CellarTracker scores, which are worth reviewing to be sure, we should “crowd source” a more representative cross section of wine drinkers who know little if anything about RPs scores. Such a tasting panel of say 20 people is the single best source for assessing vino.

By: stayingfortea

stayingfortea — Wed, 06 Jul 2011 20:35:22 +0000

The more wine you drink, the more you are able to trust your own buds. So long as tasters stick to the standard descriptors, we can learn by trial and error which descriptors best match the profile of our own taste. It seems to me that these descriptions can become more reliable than scores, which are, of course, based on the particular taste profile of the taster, which may not be at all similar to your own.

I think an interesting question to take on might be to consider how much should we trust tasters to pick winners in economic terms – that is, which wines are going to be a good investment. Granted, you’ve got an issue with reverse causality here – the opinion influencing the value as much as the fundamental value influencing the opinion. But can we test whether one taster does better at giving high ratings to wines that increase or hold their value better than another taster? Or would this just tell use which taster has the most influence over the price of wine?