Most wineries proudly display a bottle or two draped with medals trumpeting wins at a wine competition. Ribbons of gold, blue, and Cabernet purple bedeck tasting bars, along with the occasional wine goblet-topped trophy.
Wine competitions take place year round, in all kinds of venues. They may be sponsored by magazines, staged for charity, or an annual part of the proceedings at state and county fairs.
Judges may be working winemakers, expert tasters, or merely entertaining personalities guaranteed to garner favorable attention. A somewhat subjective pursuit, the judgment of wines nevertheless results in newsworthy wins and downplayed losses for participating vintners.
If a winery has received high marks from a renowned critic, such as The Wine Advocate’s Robert Parker or Wine Spectator’s James Laube, there’s likely a framed facsimile hanging front and center in the tasting room. Each expert taster has his or her own preferences of wine variety and style, but all, hopefully, can discern quality from
fatal flaws.
Wine critics judge wines according to similar criteria, such as clarity, aroma, mouthfeel, and finish, but they may use different systems to rate them. Robert Parker, for instance, employs a 100-point system that deems any wine warranting 50 to 59 points as “unacceptable.”
For the ubiquitous Parker, also known as “The Million Dollar Nose,” 60 to 79 points means a wine is below average to average—evaluations not likely to wind up in a winery’s press release. A rating that falls between 80 and 90 points indicates a “barely above average to very good” wine.
When a vintage scores 90 to 95 points, deemed “outstanding,” or a truly thrilling 96 to 100 (an “extraordinary wine of profound and complex character”), winemakers have plenty of reason to crow.
Wine Enthusiast, a lifestyle publication that covers wine, food, spirits, and travel, uses a similar system. The magazine’s resident critic, Steve Heimoff, regards a score of 80 to 82 to represent an acceptable wine suitable for casual meals, 83 to 86 to be good for everyday dining, and 87 to 89 “very good and often a good value.”
When Heimoff encounters a 90- to 93-worthy wine, he highly recommends
it as “excellent,” while 94- to 100-point wines rank from superb to “the pinnacle
of quality.”
Recently, Santa Maria’s own Alta Maria Vineyards received a vaunted 93 points for their 2008 Santa Maria Valley Chardonnay from Heimoff, a fine score that appears in the September issue of Wine Enthusiast.
“It’s always a pleasant surprise,” said James Ontiveros, director of sales and marketing at Bien Nacido Vineyard and co-founder of Alta Maria Vineyards. “When you have good scores, you’re able to use them and mention them when introducing the wine to someone.
“I’d say our batting average is at least 90 points with most of the folks who have rated them,” he continued. “In fact, I just got a description from Anthony Dias Blue’s The Tasting Panel, and we got a 92 for the Chardonnay on that.”
Although reviled as misleading by some and overly influential by others, these point-based ratings remain entrenched in the wine world. Newsletters extol high marks, shelf talkers shout about them, and confused shoppers use them to choose among the hundreds of bottles crowding wine store displays.
“The hard part is [these scores] can be a divisive thing,” Ontiveros said. “Some buyers make their decision based on what they like or not and don’t take scores into consideration.
“What we’re fighting is anonymity,” he continued. “The whole idea is for this to be a service to the potential consumer, because they can’t hear about and taste everything.”
To counter the anonymity suffered by most small producers, Ontiveros submits his wines to as many critics as possible. Whenever he receives notice of an upcoming tasting, he quickly packs up his wines for review.
“Where I get happy,” he revealed, “is when we see good marks across the board from a whole bunch of different writers, like Wine Spectator, Parker, and of course, now the Wine Enthusiast. Once people
hear about you, then the Internet or whatever can guide them to where to find the product.”
Wine lovers who find that they like the top recommendations made by Parker or Heimoff can reasonably rely on their ratings to guide them to liquid treasures. For those who don’t care for the big extracted wines that Parker seems to prefer, or the style of Sauvignon Blanc that Heimoff rewards, the best advice is to personally taste as many wines as possible and look for a critic with a parallel palate.
When it comes to wine, K. Reka Badger trusts her own palate. Contact her at rekabadger
@hotmail.com.
This article appears in Aug 12-19, 2010.