I only give marks to good wines. I’ll also report on perfectly nice wines well worth drinking, especially if the price is right. If there’s a score beside a wine, it’s usually because I’ve weighed it against many others at a tasting.
The best wines rank 90 points or higher, and they tend to be expensive. 88 or 89 is excellent. Sometimes there are several at that level, so you may worry about a wine at 86 or 87. Don’t: you have my word that it’s not only good, but better than many wines tasted in the same session. I am confident that if you buy it (having been tempted by the experience suggested in my note), you will like it.
I will comment on aspects of a wine that are disappointing, but if I think it’s actually bad, I won’t write about it. I taste quite a few wines I don’t like, but, in the variable world of wines, there are all sorts of reasons a particular bottle may not be representative. Obviously corked wine is one thing, but it’s a sliding scale: a particular bottle may be only very slightly corked, in which case the wine is merely less fruity or flatter than other bottles in the batch and just seems badly made. I also do not often get to do repeat tastings to ensure my first impression of poor quality is representative.
I also think about the dynamics of getting a wine on a shelf in a store in a big city like Toronto, which spends around a billion dollars a year on wine and has pretty much every major wine producer in the world making serious efforts to get our attention. It’s no easy task: by the time I taste it (or you are able to buy it), many knowledgeable people have tasted it and given it the thumbs up. And many other wines have failed to make the grade.
Sometimes my note is not very detailed in terms of flavours or aromas, but this is a reflection of the circumstances in which I’m tasting –a tasting may be guided and rushed, or I’m eating food, listening to a speech, or chatting with other tasters, or the tasting may be about to end, so I don’t have time to note my observations in more detail. However I can still place the wine on a quality/value scale.
I won’t crib from the winery’s tasting note (which usually assures the wine is deliciously and delightfully complex and a great example of the style) and drop in flavours or aromas I myself did not detect. However, I taste enough wines at enough different price points to make my judgement with confidence.
If you have any comments or feedback on wines I recommend, by all means let me know.
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