Wine Sediments

By Lenn Thompson
LENNDEVOURS

If you’ve come to Wine Sediments today looking for the next installment of “50 in 50,” I apologize. Due to some shipping issues (UPS screwed up, frankly), I won’t have any new wines to review for that project until later.

But fear not, I’ve always got a lot to say. Some would suggest way too much.

Today, I want to talk a little bit about the Wine Spectator and its procedure for blind tasting and reviewing wines. No, I’m not going to accuse the magazine of scoring advertiser’s wines higher than non-advertisers’ wines. My comrade in Wine Sedimentation, Tom Wark, has run the numbers and he says it’s just not true. So let’s not go there (today anyway).

Blind tasting — that is, tasting wines without knowledge of producer — is obviously the way to go. Any wine reviewer has his or her favorite wineries (no matter how hard we try not to), and a bias is bound to arise from such favoritism. I try to blind-taste as much as I can … if time and wine allows (if I only have one Finger Lakes Vignoles…it’s hard to do a blind tasting).

Where I take issue with WS is their practice of letting reviewers/tasters know the region (and I believe vintage year) of the wines in front of them. While this might seem like less than a big deal, stay with me…this gets interesting, I think.

So you’re a golden-tongued taster at WS who focuses on, say, Bordeaux and California. You sit down with 100 wines in front of you, all poured so that you have no idea who made ‘em. Then you find out that the wines were made in New York and even if you don’t roll your eyes, your frame of reference shifts and chances are you’re going to be particularly hard on these wines. Or at least the scores New York wines received in a recent issue of WS seem to reflect that harshness.

Before you label me as a local wine whiner, consider this:

In that same issue (and previously), Wine Spectator proclaims that Finger Lakes rieslings are among the best in the United States. And yet the highest scoring wine made with my favorite white-wine grape was the 89 points given to Atwater Estate (a great riesling, btw). On Long Island, the highest scoring wines were a cabernet sauvignon from Raphael, a chardonnay from Macari Vineyards and a Late Harvest Chardonnay from Wolffer. All wines that I happen to love…but where’s the merlot? I’m not 100% in favor of producers pushing Long Island as a merlot region, but fact is that many of its best wines are merlots.

So it’s no wonder that many NY winemakers think that there is a ceiling on the scores they can get from WS. They think 89 is the max. Many have stopped sending samples altogether.

Don’t get me started on the fact that wines from Lenz Winery, Lieb Cellars or Channing Daughters Winery (among others) were not even reviewed. Seriously, don’t get me started.

Who am I to question the WS tasting procedures? I’m someone who doesn’t see why they need to tell tasters what region they are tasting. My guess is that a lot of the New York merlots and red blends would be mistaken for Bordeaux (with more fruit) and that the best chardonnays would be assumed to be white Burgundy.

To me, WS doesn’t truly blind taste. They vision-impaired taste.

End of rant.