Score Whore or Valuable Tool

Okay, so first off, don't read too much into the title until you've had time to read through this post.  I don't want anyone getting the wrong ideas. 

I can admit it, I'm a score whore.  Drop into the wine shop and you'll see tons of shelf talkers, those are the little cards that tell you about the wine and what someone else thought of that wine.  I was so use to using those ratings when I was buying wine in the past because, come on, these people REALLY knew wine.  I was just a loathsome wine drinker who didn't know cabernet from zinfandel.  So off I went in search of wines with great ratings.  

Due to the prestigious nature of Wine Spectator magazine, I poured over every issue I could get my hands on.  Trying to find that really great wine I couldn't live without.  Of course what I didn't know is that some of those wines were not always that easy to come by.  Maybe cult wines that could only be obtained through the winery, or wines so highly allocated that even if a wine shop somewhere had some, they too, allocated the wine to their best customers, of which I was not one of.   Back to the drawing board.  I can say all my efforts were not altogether unsucessful.  I manged to find a few gems along the way.

After a while, I started to take notice that there where other wine reviewers.  Ah, here's my chance to expand even further.  Unfortunately, same situations and same results.  Only a handful of wines that were available.  Then I noticed something altogether disturbing.  The reviewers didn't always match on their reviews and scores for the same wines.  How could this be.  Aren't they tasting the same wines, don't they all experience the same nuances of the wines, so how could they be so different in their judgements.  

It was about that time that I decided that I wanted to explore the wine biz and see just what it's all about.  I dug deeper into all sorts of the various components of wine and wine making.  I found a great book by Andrea Immer (now Robinson) titled " Great Wines Made Simple."  She put in simple terms (that was very important for me at the time) about the different grape varieties and how grapes grown in the various parts of the world can differ.  This was a real page turner!  Yeah, it was for me anyway.

So here I am, full of new found information and a desire to go out and make my first wine.  That never happened.  But I did gain a much better understanding of wine and it's nuances and components. Enough so that I could start to tell the difference between cab and zin (a big milestone for me).  As my reading about wines changed from just reviews to the more intricate details, it started to become clearer to me that people can perceive these factors in various ways.  Ah Ha!  There's the rub.  Now I'm beginning to understand why those reviews are so different.  I guess as I kept strolling down the path of Route Wine, things just started falling into place.  

Back to the issue at hand.  The reason for my curiosity is that while exploring wine reviews for a particularly well known and usually well rated wine, I saw such a huge range in ratings, I was actually shocked.  From a low of 85 all the way to 96.  That to me being in the wine world, is, as they say, LOTS! I won't tell you name of the wine as I prefer to bring out the good in wines, not the not so good.

Bottom line, it is all a matter of personal taste and likes and dislikes.  While I might be able to tell you if  a wine is made particularly well, I can only hope that you will like the wines I buy and choose for you.  In the meantime, feel free to read the shelf talkers and notice the scores, but in the final analysis, you're the one that's going to know whether you like the wine or not.  And I will continue to be a Score Whore who loves to know what all the "professionals" out there think.

Cheers