A recent article about Wine Spectator and Parker ratings by Mark Fisher over at Uncorked got me thinking. In the blog-post he identified wines with big discrepancies between Wine Spectator and Robert Parker ratings and he then organized a tasting of these wines to see who was right. Fisher went through a number of recent wines and identified the biggest difference as Dominus: WS: 81, Parker: 95, a 14 point difference. It was an interesting premise and his conclusion was that these were all good wines and that the critic who voted low on the pairings was at fault. This shared the blame. There were the inevitable comments on the post re-iterating the common wisdom that critic ratings are bad for everyone.
As stated before, ratings are here to stay, and they affect current and future price of Investment Grade Wine (IGW). As such it is important to understand what affect they have. Now ratings affect all wines, but they affect IGW more as they affect the secondary market as well.
Here are some of the differences:
- For normal wines the magic rating number is 90. If a wine scores 90 it sells well; if it is does not (even 89) it does poorly. For IGW the stakes are higher. The wine has to score gain a 95 Parker rating to do well on the secondary market. A 95 Wine Spectator rating will then confirm that score. Even in the great vintages there are not many wines that score more than 95 from both critics
- For a home-run, destined to last decades, a double century (a cricket term) has an amazing affect on a wine. This is a 100 point score from both Wine Spectator and Parker. If you analyze their scores over time, there is a definite feeling that if Parker scores a 100, WS does so very grudgingly and is more inclined to be in the 95 to 99 range. A future blog post will cover some of the double century wines
- High ratings have more of an affect on price on the non-first-growth wines. For the five first growth wines they will charge an enormous price irrespective of the ratings. This is also true for the right bank aristocrats like Petrus and Le Pin. They can do this due to the huge following they have. However, high ratings for ANY other wine can double the price of these wines on release, which is then maintained in the auction market.
Anyway back to the issue of discrepancies between Parker and WS. I went back over the ratings for IGW to see how much correlation there is. Usually they are not too far out. However there are some big ones, and there are some generalizations:
- The older the wine the greater the discrepancies
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