Wine Spectator Reviewers: Are they honest, or on the take?

With the cited instance, I'd speculate that the scores reflected the tastings done at the time. Picking a very young wine and devining its ability to mature into a great one over time, is akin to alchemy. Some have an uncanny ability to delve into the future, but I doubt most do, even amongst professional tasters. Bottle variation, and many other aspects along the road to maturity can effect the wine too.

With the extreme pressure to rate the wines, without benefit of marketing, advertising $'s, or even public opinion, I'd side with the WS tasters to do the best that they can. I may be wrong in this assessment of their situation, but I think that a scandal within their publication would totally undermine their advertising revenue.

All stated IMHO, Hunt

Actually, I doubt it would be a "scandal", and anyway I'm sure the advertisers love having their wines rated highly.

Simply think "commercial reality". Advertisements generate income. Good reviews generate advertisements. Have you ever read about the worst wines in any tasting from any publication? I guess a 80-points is bad enough when the winery expects 90-points! Any wine reported at below 70-points & you are liable to be sued! When I want 95-points, I try to make an about 90-point wine (high extraction, high alcohol, micro-oxy, whatever) & dangle an attractive advertising budget. Do I get it?

That's commercial reality but readers/subscribers are lapping up all the good stuff, not knowing better.

On the other hand, no one survives without pampering to those who are paying ......... advertisers or subscribers.

This comes up periodically. I'm no fan of WS. I don't like panel tastings (no one to "calibrate" to), I don't think that Suckling or Mansson (sp?) match my tastes very well, etc. I don't subscribe, though I did in my more innocent years, and have long list of problems I could name with the "Speculator". But while I've often heard the complaint that they trade points for ads, I've never seen anyone try and really analyze it, except Jon Reuter.

Jon, a poster on WCWN who is apparently a statistician(he was a frequent and respected poster who has no apparent connection to WS) posted this a couple years ago: "I've actually done a fairly technical (and therefore boring) review of WS advertising and ratings (using WA ratings as a sort of control group) and found only a slight bias at WS. For the majority of wines, the WS and WA ratings are statistically indistiguishable. However, it does appear that WS is more likely to retaste wines from advertisers and that these wines as a group benefit from being retasted (to the tune of 2-3 points). To put that effect in context though, less than 5 percent of wines are retasted so the overall average bias is quite small.

Furthermore, conditional on price, production, and actual WS rating, there does not appear to be any bias in who receives the various awards. So the earlier post by a former WSer claiming that advertising and awards are unrelated appears to be dead on."

There was a disclaimer that he only did the analysis for US wines for a 3 year period I believe.

Of course, an extended analysis AFTER a winery scores high would probably show a bigger correlation, because if WS scored one's wine a 94 wouldn't you think of advertising there to remind readers once that issue has passed?

Now, the entry level restaurant awards are another thing. Pretty much any restaurant that pays the $100 fee gets an award (602 out of 763 first time entrants according to their own website).

Dale

Dale Williams Drop "damnspam" to reply

I don't know if advertising affects ratings in the Wine Speculator, though I'd be willing to believe it didn't, or if it did , only to the extent that the odd bad review of a good advertiser was simply omitted rather than changed.

But more to the point, upon reflection I find that I don't really care whether their reviews are truly independent or not. More important to me is the fact that they reviews are often just not very good, and that there is little consistency, with people that clearly have no experience or ability to assess a particular style of wine penning gibberish and calling it a review.

Some of my favourite Italian wines used to be rated in the 70s by these twits just because the guy writing the column apparently had zero experience with traditional lean mean Italian wines that need years to come into focus.

I dropped my subscription to WS last year and haven't missed it a bit.

Dale,

Thanks for taking the time to delve into the vaults for that piece. My general assumption, based on memory, and glances at the ads (since I'm in advertising, I cannot resist, though I'm usually being critical of the photo, the layout, the typeface used... ) I do not recall a direct correlation between the wines tasted and those most advertised - MOF, it almost seems the opposite. Now, there are occasions where wine A will get "wine of the year," etc. and there will be an ad in that edition also trumpeting that achievement, but that is magazine advertising. If an architectural mag bestows an award to an architect, chances are that firm/person will be contacted as soon as the award is announced, and will then run an ad in the same edition. It should not be assumed that BECAUSE of the ad, the award was given. It rarely is.

Now, with the restaurant awards... I have ALWAYS had bones to pick over those. While some of the WS tasters (a few you mentioned) don't match MY tastes, I have almost never agreed with the restaurant awards, until you get to the very top, and then I still find some glaring faults.

Hunt

Robert Parker accepts no advertising or free bottles; he survives exclusively on subscribers. But I don't see how subscribers would bias his results. So whether you agre with Parkers palate or not, I can't see any bias here.

With the Wine Spectator, there is the possibility (unproven) that advertising could affect their scores.

Tom Schellberg

Tom,

Actually the allusion to a "scandal," that I made earlier applied directly to Mr Parker's organization. Probably unwittingly, a person in his employ was involved in some suspect deals with wine makers, or distributors. It seems that when confronted with the evidence, he immediately terminated this employee. I do not believe that his organization, and his ratings/tastings were in any way compromised, however the possiblity did seem to exist. I wish I had a URL for the unfortunate set of events, but I do not. When I can sit down with Google, I'll see what I can find.

I think that it is possiblity of such a scandal, and the damage that it could do to the readreship of a magazine, that, at least in part, keeps 'em honest. That, and the drive to do the best that they can for all readers, whether casual, or subscribers. Just MHO.

Hunt

I haven't done any scientific analysis, but I will report that, in the

8/31/04 issue, James Laube gave a 55-point rating to Gallo of Sonoma Chard Sonoma Cty Reserve 2002 because six of eight samples tasted were corky while the other two, "showed musty flavors."

I mention this because, on page 217, editor and publisher Marvin Shanken is pictured hobnobbing with four members of the Gallo clan (including Matt and Gina).

Dan-O

...

nobody@nowhere.

[SNIP]

I hope he was pointing out a possible fault in their system, regarding the Gallo Sonoma Chard.

Hunt

I have been astonished at low scores by some Italian wines that I know to be superb from drinking them. Italian wines aren't to be 'tasted' but drunk with food. Italian wines are quite regionalized, and are intended to be drunk with the dishes of the region. (Evaluating a Morellino di Scansano as if it were a California Merlot is idiocy.) Of late there has been a tendency to produce 'international' styles (Cabs, etc.) but I seldom if ever drink those.