I asked myself this question, as I was reading a James Halliday mail, where four wines were rated at 95 points plus, reviewed by different wine critics. They were
- Bleasdale Vineyard Invenium Viam Cabernet Malbec 2020
- Pooles Rock Solier Settler Semillon 2024
- Bannockburn Shiraz 2023
- Dear Zahra Pinot Noir 2024
Bleasdale has been around for a while, but has never stood out, in my experience. Pooles Rock and Dear Zahra I am not familiar with. Bannockburn certainly has the reputation, and some track record, even with Shiraz, not their main variety.
Sure, you could go for wines two and four, if you wanted to try something new. But I find that new labels are often showy. I like to cellar wines, and this leads me to some conservatism, I guess.
What do you think?
3 comments:
They need to recalibrate the scoring, they've clearly gotten too excessive on average imo. It'd be good to be more transparent too on what drives a given number e.g. tannin quality.
To give an example the '22 Diana Madeline was scored 98 on Real Review, 97 on Halliday and a more reasonable 93 from the Wine Front. Tannin/overall quality was clearly inferior to prior vintages but you wouldn't guess that from the above except the Wine Front. There's a tendency to overclub prestige labels but we also fail to calibrate to overseas enough imo. I think our finest examples can compete with overseas equivalents across many varieties but some like sangiovese we're clearly inferior and no harm in reflecting that in scores.
I'll admit it's tricky as the exercise is hardly scientific but more transparency wouldn't hurt.
That would obviously hurt business too much, wineries love these high scores and so do retailers
For me, winery track record is all important. Reviewer scores are regrettably meaningless nowadays. I simply ignore them.
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