Kind of a ghost town in here.
How about a "Crtic's Corner" here in Wine Asylum?
1) I don't like 100 point rating scales.
First, they only go down to 40 or 50. It's like gymnastics in the Olympics. Some fat guy in a leotard could go climb up on the balance beam, belch, and then fall off and get the minimum 4.5 out of 6.
I guess if a wine will pour out of a bottle and assume the shape of its container, it gets a 50.
Second, wine cannot be scored that precisely. It lends itself toward wandering if the same wine word blind tasted the next week, the reviewer is skillful enough to give it exactly the same score.
All the hundred point scale accomplishes is driving wine idiots to the store to demand a wine that scored a 96 over the wine that scored a 95.
How many times have you tried chatting about wine and run into people who can only describe the quality of their tasting experience by telling you how many points the wine they drank had been rated?
The hundred point scale is a crutch for wine idiots that leads them into pretension rather than appreciation.
2) Wine Spectator and other critics piss me off.
I cringe whenever someone tells me about a wine I like that got rated highly by the critics. Then, all the vicarious wine hunters run to the store and take away MY wine! :)
3) When the critics say they taste blind, and then we find out they tasted "blindly" in a flight of three wines, two of which were white, it calls into question the inherent greatness of Screaming Eagle cab.
4) Which leads me to these 98-100 ratings on those "Only 10 cases made" wines.
a) Any winemaker should be able to make one barrel that's fantastic. Wine that's that limited is not a commercial release. It's like saying that a hand tailered DKNY is "better" than a DKNY off the rack. Save the space for wines that consumers can go taste and check your rating skills. Brag about the half barrel wines, but don't bother to add to your bragging with absurd ratings.
b) They rate those wines that highly so they can continue to get them to taste and be exclusive and hip, sure. But they also rate them that highly because they know no one will ever be able to go out and expose their palates.
c) Those "reviews" are read by audio manufacturers, who then go out and try to re-create that exclusivity by making "limited run" audio gear. Bullshit! Audio makers like McIntosh and Musical Fidelity should be skilled enough to take inorganic parts and make as many amplifiers as needed. Don't let wine cults leak into hi fi.
I can see the future..."The new Musical Fidelity 740CSI...so good that we could only make it in very small batches from aluminum billets...only 60 "cases" made!"
d) Creating wine cults demeans us all. It turns wine drinking into stock speculation. Wine is for ultimate consumption, no?
Wine "appreciation" should be based on drinking it, not flipping it.