Comments on: Value

By: fertilizers agrochemicals

fertilizers agrochemicals — Sat, 25 Oct 2008 00:51:48 +0000

such a great post!

By: Thomas

Thomas — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 19:16:12 +0000

Jay,
I agree with some but have reservations on other Goldstein findings. This is the man who perpetrated that big restaurant wine award fraud on the Spectator, which exposed the magazine’s less than beautiful method of giving out the award. It may be that he has something against WS.
Having said that, ratings and awards would stand on much firmer ground with me if they were all handed out from blind evaluations, with the price being revealed to the tasters after they’ve made evaluations concerning wines about which they know nothing other than wine is in the glass.
Anything short of that system is surely to include a bias here and there, and even a small inconsequential bias taints the whole evaluation.
In our Riesling taste off, the only thing anyone will know is that it is a Riesling taste off between similarly styled wines from two continents, and for me, that’s too much information.

By: Jay

Jay — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 18:44:27 +0000

Thomas,
Your blog prompted me to pick the book up yesterday. My initial impression is mixed. I empathize with and applaud his somewhat populist approach (to a degree). He begins to skate on thinner ice when his arguments leave the distinction between “everyday wine drinkers” vs. “wine experts” as a distant memory. That critical distinction explains several things that seem easy to underappreciate. For instance (p 15): “At press time, Wine Spectator had rated 6475 wines from the 2000 to 2007 vintages that cost $10 or less. Of those, only three of them — four hundreths of one percent — scored above 90 on the magazine’s 100-point scale, and none scored above 91. … [Last sentence on p 15] How could our results diverge so dramatically from the magazine critics’ opinions ?” Remember that the “wine experts” showed a slight positive correlation between price and scoring, so it seems something reminiscent of a straw man argument? He also seems to favor certain brans himself, including Harvard and Yale. Overall, his countercharges against hype are useful. Cheers.

By: Thomas

Thomas — Sun, 05 Oct 2008 15:15:06 +0000

Jay,

Goldstein’s single premise, which he backs up with a series of tastings around the country and among consumers and wine professionals, is that his statistics plainly indicate that when tasted blind, the overwhelming majority wine preferences are in the so-called “value” class, or priced even lower.

He further provides evidence that the overwhelming majority of wines that reap high ratings from major critics at magazines and newsletters are upper priced wines, which goes against the blind tasting findings.

He digs a little into why this may be so, not the least of which is that the critics often don’t bother with evaluating lower priced wines, and they more often than not evaluate wines with far too much advance information about them.

According to Goldstein, many critics and others in the trade evaluate wines already knowing the prices, rendering moot the idea that they would gauge what they would be willing to pay for a wine they had just tasted, and it is a main reason he feels that they provide a disservice to consumers.

By: Jay

Jay — Sun, 05 Oct 2008 14:09:39 +0000

Thomas,

What are some of the highlights of Goldstein’s “Wine Trials” ?
Care to comment why few wine evaluations — possibly excluding decisions by retailers and others in the trade — seem to so seldomly gauge what they’d be willing to pay for a bottle before learning what its price is ? Couldn’t such practices partly counter the hype by critics and other inflationary agents ?

By: Thomas

Thomas — Sat, 04 Oct 2008 15:30:25 +0000

Henrik,

That’s why money IS spent on marketing.

Quality is a fleeting concept.

By: Henrik

Henrik — Sat, 04 Oct 2008 13:44:57 +0000

Thomas, Thats whu money are better spent on Markedting than an enolog to improve quality…

Henrik