Wine Spectator rant numbers 3 and 4

Rants numbers 3 and 4 have a similar theme. The first is Wine Spectator's use of barrel samples and in-the-field tastings to rate vintages and wines prior to release. The second rant involves their assertion that their ratings are accurate in the maximum drinkability window.

Rating vintages and wines on pre-release or barrels samples is, at best, like test driving a car and then ordering another directly from the factory. You never really know what you are going to get. From my guitar experience it would be like buying a guitar after listening to someone else's "identical" model. Each guitar is a grouping of unique pieces of wood, cut and assembled discretely. Whether mass produced or hand made, any guitar maker or player worth a gross of picks will tell you that two guitars made right next to each other from wood cut from the same tree and right next door when the pieces are sawn will still have different tonal properties. They may be similar but they will never sound the same. Like guitars, wine is a living, breathing, changing item. Pre-release samples or barrels are often cherry picked by vitners to showcase the wine. The Bordelaise or California Big Cab makers may make 20 or more different "assemblages" over the bottling of a vintage of wine. Although the winemaker may strive to make each bottling similar, it cannot physically be done. I think I read where Paul Draper and the crew at Ridge might make a dozen or more assemblages from their various barrels for Monte Bello. Does anyone really think that every barrel intended for bottling of a vintage of a given wine is commutated before bottling. No way. Does not happen. So it is bad enough that the finished bottle I buy may be different than yours but how about rating a wine or vintage of an unfinished assembly or a barrel sample? Even worse. When I read the crap about the 2005 Bordeaux vintage where the Speculator, Sir Bobbie and the rest are slinging 95's and 100's like a drunk rich guy at a titty bar, I say "bullshit". There is no way they can have any more than the most mind-boggling WAG about the true worth of the vintage. Oh, they say, we talked to the winemakers and they all say it is the best swill we have made since blah, blah, blah. You think a winemaker is going to diss his product? Give me a break. Every bottle the make is liquid gold in their overcharging, paid-to-much-for-my-vineyard, God-complex minds.

You ever notice how these wine rating a-holes never compare their barrel/pre-release sample ratings to their bottled sample ratings? You ever try to do it? It is pretty difficult because there are often several years between the publication of the pre-samples and the bottle rankings. They do not want you to do it because they know it would expose the idea of pre-release or barrel ratings as a farce perpetuated to help the winemaking corporations sell swill so that they advertise in their mags. My recommendation is never buy on these pre-tastings. I buy Monte Bello futures every year because I like the wine and I trust Draper won't put out a piece of crap. If you have a favorite wine and want to buy futures, have at it. But know what you are in for and don't ever trust what the wine writing ya-hoos at the Speculator or RP or ST or whomever say.

Now on to the actual bottle rankings. Does anyone really believe the Spectator's assertion that they are rating the wine not how it is now but how it will be when it hits it peak. F--k!!!! Give me a break. God could probably, maybe come up with such a number. But those bozo's. Yea, right. I bought the '92 Caymus Special Selection Cabernet which old Jimmy Laube gave 99 points. I drank it throughout the "drinking window" and it never, ever approached 99 points. Even when the Speculator re-rated it in 2002 in one of their ten year retrospectives, the wine, which should have been right at the peak, only got something like an 89. I would have to go back to my Speculator back issues to look up the actual number, but it was not much higher than that, if at all.

Snap, there it is. By their own admission their rankings "at peak" are bullshit, to quote old Penn and Teller. It boggles the mind that these guys think they are so great at tasting that they can actually predict how a wine will be 5 maybe 10 or more years down the road. What a bunch of arrogant, wine geeky, snobby pigs. It is unfathomable that these jerkoffs can claim to rate the wine "at its peak". You can rate it now, but don't feed the rest of us that you somehow are prescient or God.

NOT