‘The thing about you, Oliver, is that your scores seem to end where everyone else’s appear to start’.
‘The thing about you, Oliver, is that your scores seem to end where everyone else’s appear to start’.I’m not quite sure who barked that comment at me, but I know it was a decade ago or more. Since then, whatever gap that existed between the scores I give wines and those of most others has widened into a chasm. The other day I gave a pretty little pinot from Tassie a score of 89, meaning it was not quite enough for a silver medal on my version of the 100-point scale. It was charming enough but lacks the drive and weight I’d need to see to rate it more highly. A few days later the same wine collected the trophy for the Best Wine at the Sydney Wine Show.
I’ve looked at a few other pinots lately that were allocated stratospheric scores by some supposedly authoritative titles, but I just can’t comprehend what they saw in the wines. Some people do need to be reminded that there are only three possible levels of wine quality above the score of 97.
This is going on all the time and I’ve written about it before here and here. It’s perhaps inevitable when a media outlet views the industry whose product it is meant to be criticising as instead its major or only source of income.
Leaving that elephant in the room aside for the moment, there are other reasons why my scores, which have been on the same scale for ever and a day (check out my ratings over 40 years of tasting at Oliver’s Wines to confirm this) are often at odds with – meaning lower than – those given by the plethora of industry consultants, winemakers, show judges, retailers, bloggers and so forth who create or control most of the wine-related content in this country.
For a start, I taste all wine on the same scale, whether it’s a $6 bottle of Jacob’s Creek or a $6000 bottle of Burgundy.
I don’t alter a wine’s score upwards because I think it’s good value for money. Others do this (see here), but I think every single consumer has their own right to determine what they think is value and what isn’t. I believe a critic’s job is to present an assessment of quality and a price – then let the readers decide for themselves.
My scores don’t reflect where a wine comes from. I try to rate all wine with a perspective that is genuinely international. I don’t rate a wine more highly because it might come from a favourite region like Tuscany or Margaret River. Or – and this is the herd of elephants clamouring to get into the room – because it comes from Australia. Honestly, I just can’t believe that the ‘critics’ giving 95+ scores to the pinots I mentioned earlier could do the same if those wines were included in a tasting of top Burgundy. I just can’t. Or maybe I’m being too kind…?
A score of 97 is a very serious number. On that basis most of the top Burgundy I have tasted would rate more than 110. Yet there are only 100 points in the 100-point scale. Funny, really, because for way too many current wine ‘influencers’ it’s actually a 6-point scale between 95 and 100. Daft, isn’t it? Last week I gave 81 points to one of those 95+-rated pinot noirs. Hard to explain a gap of that size. I’ve written about what my scores out of 100 actually mean, how I created my own scale (in conjunction with James Halliday) and how they relate to scores out of 20 here.
It’s hard for me not to believe that I’m one of the few in this country who does not give an Australian wine a bonus allocation of marks out of 100 simply because it comes from Australia. I’ve written about the damage this approach causes here.
I have a load of friends in the wine industry but I’m not in a clique with anyone or any of them. I write as an outsider, not an insider; that’s where a critic needs to be. I don’t need to follow a trend, have skin in the game, take instructions from anyone or feel under pressure to alter my scores or comments because of external forces. The winemakers who are my friends will agree to a person that I tend to mark their wines even harder than those of others – largely to make it clear to all that friendship and giving scores are two entirely separate things for me. It would help neither of us over time if I rated a friend’s wines too highly; the opposite would prevail.
Oliver’s Wines generates its income by selling wine – that’s a fact. Does this mean I source wines that I think I could sell, buy them cheaply and increase my ratings? Nothing of the sort. I wrote earlier that all my ratings over time are freely available on the platform and if they suddenly spiked without a commensurate improvement in quality, my game is up. I’ve structured my business so any reader can police my ratings on this issue. If I started cheating, I’d have nowhere to hide.
Similarly, if my scores for a wine brand suddenly dived without its declining in quality, I’d have something to explain in the event there was a competitor listed in the Oliver’s Wines shop. I’m always open and ready for any such discussion. And for over the 40 or so years I’ve always been open to re-taste bottles of a wine if their makers feel I got my rating wrong.
Sometimes, if I was on the verge of allocating a score low enough to raise eyebrows to a famous label, I’ve even asked makers to let me re-taste the wine. This is out of respect to the brand as well as an awareness that I could get it wrong – I’m human after all. It happened with the 2008 vintage of Penfolds Grange, which was given a perfect score when evaluated by Lisa Perotti-Brown (for the publication that continues to use Robert Parker’s name and reputation without his personal input). I can’t remember if Peter Gago – the public face of Penfolds – let me taste it two or three times before I settled on the score or 94 which I believed (and still believe) it deserves.
To wrap, I’m still rating wines the same way I have always done, and I’m not about to change. I’m not for sale. I don’t need any more friends. I’m under no external pressure to increase scores. I’ve tasted enough of the greatest wines on the planet to give me perspective, and I measure all my ratings against my assessments of those wines. I don’t care about price. When rating wines I’m working not for the wine producers, but for the buying public. I try to be as accurate as I can be and I don’t give a 6-10 point bonus for a wine just because it’s Australian.
All of this makes me rather different today. Funnily enough, when I started writing about wine in the 1980s just about everyone else had the same approach.
