Comments on: How I score wine

By: wineconversation.com » Blog Archive » Interactive wine tasting

wineconversation.com » Blog Archive » Interactive wine tasting — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 16:44:36 +0000

[...] How I score wine (steveheimoff.com) [...]

By: steve

steve — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 13:17:37 +0000

Yes the rating comes first. I do the tasting note “in my head,” then compose it for the computer. A tasting note is like a haiku. It requires some effort to get clarity and precision into 30 or 40 words.

By: Tish

Tish — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 13:01:24 +0000

Steve, you write: “At some point, I hand-carry the glass with the wine to my computer, where I fill in the actual score and text into Wine Enthusiast’s database. This is the final act of the tasting process, where everything is confirmed. When I hit the “send” button, the review is transported to the magazine’s server, in New York, and my part in the ratings chain is over.”

Can I ask a stupid-simple question: When do you actually do the tasting note?

I ask this at the risk, again, of being branded only anti-ratings. But seriously, in this whole harangue about how you find a pace-setter and come up with the numbers, you refer to the characteristics you find in the wine, but I re-read this post and see nothing about when/how you do the actual description that I, a word guy, care about.

Based on this, is it correct to assume that the rating actually — and always — comes first in your methodology?

By: steve

steve — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 16:46:20 +0000

Erika, so true. Alas…

By: David

David — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 14:53:06 +0000

Do we ask movie reviewers if their impressions are statistically significant? Do we want to debate the “thumbs up” scoring system? What about a restaurant reviewer? Do we want to know what they ate last to see if there is a bias? Maybe they had spicey food for lunch and now their palate is not in proper shape for a seafood restaurant. Holy mackeral.

I don’t think Steve or anyone is presenting the reviews as sensory analysis or there would be labs acoss america rating wines, not magazines.
Just having a number there doesn’t make it a quantitative analysis by any means. They are always just opinions of people with educated palates and I think most people know that. It is a guide that can be helpful particularly once you know a reviewers preferences.

I know which movie reviewers I usually agree with and which ones I don’t. That doesn’t mean that all reviews are worthless.

I think this was helpful and shows the sincere effort taken to sample the wines.