Wine Spectator Rant #2 overrating Wines

This is a pretty easy rant. There is no doubt in my mind that the Speculator overrates their wines, inconsistenly, on a regular basis. I believe they do this to support their source of revenue, the wine producers, resellers, distributors and others closely tied to the trade. I cannot begin to count the number of wines that I have tasted that get huge ratings and with which I have no agreement whatsoever. Case in point, 1992 Caymus Special Select rated 99 points. No freakin' way. The wine was good, but all three bottles I had were well below this. This week I had a 1999 Domaine du Pesquier Gigondas rated 94 and one of the top 20 wines of the year by the Spectator - HA. This wine was weak and full of bret, no way it was a 94. Maybe 82-84, maybe a little higher or lower. 94 was a joke and a lie.

So what gives, how can they be this bad?

Every taster, of course, has their own biases. This is to be expected and there are some tasters that I have more agreement with than others. Their European tasters are particularly screwed up. I can almost never find a wine rating from their European raters that is within a mile of what I think.

But I think it goes deeper than this. The Speculator has nothing to gain financially by rating wines difficultly. It has only been in the last year or so that they have gotten tougher with the Californians, I think because everything they rated out of Cali had 90 points or above. I have clearly noticed a reduction in scores in Cali wines, especially zinfandel. I think this re-calibration was needed, but I think they have to admit that they may actually have gone too far or that their old system was screwy there. But they will never do that. In the rest of the world, they have yet to keep up. See my last rant for an example, where they refuse to bust the balls of the French and Italians who load their wines up with bret because they are too stupid, lazy and cheap to get it out of there. Come on, step up and call it right you jerkoffs.

If the SPEC rates wines right, they risk losing advertising money and ruin their relationship with the trade. Without a rep, would they even get the wines to rate? What is crapiest about this overatting is how it affects wine prices on the shelf. Case in point the 2003 Domaine du Pegau Chateauneuf-du-Pape Reservee. This wine was selling at $50 pre-release until the Spectator gave it a 97. Next day, it went to $75. Give me a break. Okay, assume this rating is right. But in the overwhelming number of cases where they have overrated, the Spectator's inconsistent overrating of wines much more objectionable. First I pay them to read their rag and then they overrate a wine and it costs me money if I want to buy it. Then, when I try it, it tastes only a fraction of how they rated it. Sickening.

I guess the real solution is not to read the rag and to trust only your own opinion. These jerkoffs do not deserve our reading their rag unless they commit to getting independent, rating consistently and do their jobs. Do you think they ever run any statistics to determine the variability of their staff ratings? I highly doubt it. They would have nothing to gain by putting science and statistics behind their objective crap. In our lab, we know the variability of in our test protocols and we know which operators read high, which read low and which read average. We consciously retrain people who are not up to spec to make sure our lab is accurate and precise. The Speculator...don't count on it. I say again, they do not want to know what their accuracy and precision on their ratings are. Better to ignore it, overrate everything and hope people keep buying your piece of crap.

I say again, I need to grow a set and stop paying for this rag.