Living Impressionism - Monet 95 points/Renoir 93 but a "Best Buy"
Tuesday, March 9, 2010 at 6:51AM 
The white blurs intertwined and wove themselves in and then out of the lights. They could move from absolute stillness to a dazzling, dizzying swirl of energy and grace. The second act of Swan Lake in this winter’s performance by the San Francisco Ballet was like watching a Renoir or Monet come to life.
As the beautiful vision of the dancers floated from the stage the first row leapt to their feet and, like the Olympics, rated the performers with points. Holding up their placards they reduced art to sport. Absurd, right? While such a nightmare is offensive to anyone who cares about beauty this is exactly what we now do with both food and wine. Today wine is about points and food is about Iron Chef TV slap-downs.
Could there be anything more anti-fine dining than turning wine and food into a sport? Yet this is precisely what we have done. As when you watch a ballet or contemplate a painting, fine food and wine should transport you away from the intensity of day-to-day life and inspire your mind to find peace and pleasure. Dinner should be a time to slow down, not a best of three falls.
There are two big lies in the wine world. The first is that price is related to quality and, second, is that point ratings for wines are worth anything. Beside the fact that rating wines with points is an affront to what they were created for (to be part of a meal), they are a lie on on their own turf - statistics. To be meaningful a critic that rates wines on a numerical scale, be that 10, 20 or 100 points, must be able to repeat those results over-and-over in all tasting conditions. Anyone who knows anything about taste and the human condition knows that is a joke. Critics that use points are not only fooling their readers, they’re fooling themselves.
I defy anyone to take this test. We’ll take twenty-five top quality wines of one place and variety and blind taste them over a five day period without the expert tasters knowing the variety or place of origin having them rank the wine using their preferred scale . Each day we’ll open a fresh bottle, then taste the wines in four flights, in each flight changing the order of the wines being tasted. Needless to say, that if these results were analyzed the worthlessness of reviews based on points would be clearly established. If statistical results cannot be repeated they are worthless, which is exactly the value of the point ratings used by the major wine critics.
Not that anyone would listen because while consumers like points as a simple way to make buying choices, wine producers like them even more as a simple way to market their wines. The point is that points are an easy way out for everyone, but most of all it is an easy way out for the big wine publications. After all we should remember their business is not selling wine or helping people to buy better wine. Their business is selling magazines, which is something rating wines on a point scale does better than reliable information ever would. Their readers want it simple and fast so that’s what they give them.
The title of this article jokes about rating Monet 95 points, but giving only 93 to Renoir although he is given a “Best Buy” nod. The real joke of this is that during their own time Monet and Renoir where given very low “points” by the critics. This should remind us all that the creative pleasures of life: dance, music, painting, food and wine among so may others are not so easily reduced into numerical simplicity. The very complexity of these pleasures combined with the intense differences our individual personalities interact to create something that is not possible to quantify or rank on a precise scale.
When you’re experiencing the best, points are pointless.
Reader Comments (5)
I printed this out and will bring it to my wine merchant.
Educated and well written wine descriptions should be a certification requirement.
Many thanks Gordon, coming from someone like you who so clearly understands the concept of fine dining, such a comment is a true compliment.
Therefore, we learn:
After time that Monet and Renoir both cellar well. ;-)
Sadly for the wine consumer: the fact that "one man's 95 is another man's 90 or –gasp– 89(!), is not of that much value after all.
And the original purpose of a king employing a sommelier was to protect the king from sudden death, not to pair the cellar red with the local charred elk.
bobz
Last point of Bob Rohden is just brillant.
I wrote somthing alike in http://theflyingwinedrinker.blogspot.com/2010/02/sommeliers-are-not-arrognats.html
Craig, I couldn't agree more with you. Studies already shows what you are suggesting: Put tasters to the taste, they will fail miserably. I just read this, no long time ago: "An analysis of the number of Gold medals received in multiple competitions indicates that the probability of winning a Gold medal at one competition is stochastically independent of the probability of receiving a Gold at another competition, indicating that winning a Gold medal is greatly influenced by chance alone.”
Even if possible to give points, being wine a living thing, it is just useless as it will change from the date you taste it to the day somebody somewhere in the world open it.
Saying all this, when it comes to the moment of selling wines, although people dosn't really know what 94 points means, it sounds good, and give them some placebo for the pain of open their wallet...
I don't put much stock in wine scores. I think that they are dysfunctional abstractions that have nothing to do with what a given wine means to the person who drinks it. They seem to guide consumers but in the end I think they only distract people and misdirect them. Tasting notes alone will do much more to give a consumer an idea of a wine, putting a score next to it will only serve to distract them from the actual flavors of the drink. I do not however think that experienced tasters would be stumped by a tasting of 25 wines over the course of one day. A whole day gives one enough time to accurately analyze 25 wines. I doubt the results would be the same everyday but I'd bet they come close. I wrote a little about the subject of scores and upcoming en primeur tastings in Bordeaux at http://bacchism.wordpress.com. Let me know what you think.