Are wine scores rising faster than global temperatures or, maybe it’s just me? Everywhere I look I continue to see more and more wine slowly creep into the 90+ point camp and I have to ask, how can this be? Are lower-end wineries just suddenly making better wine out of nowhere?  Did their Board meet one day and say, “Hey, lets make better wine”? Does it have anything to do with warmer and longer growing seasons allowing grapes to ripen?

Or perhaps tastes are changing from elegant, balanced, superbly crafted wine with character, to huge over-ripe, over-extracted wine that you could drive a truck through for four-wheeling fun. In many cases it doesn’t change the fact that the trend in the past couple of years has seen many lower priced wines from enormous beverage corporations move up in score. Wine Spectator for example has been value oriented for the past eighteen months or more. This is fine for some people but I did not renew my subscription because of this. I would rather have their reviews save me from making a $500 mistake than a $10 mistake when I purchase wine. And because I have experienced very little (if any) drinkable $10 wine, I definitely don’t care to read about it – sorry man, I’m just not impressed.

Even with the gazillion wine blogs and little independent voices like mine out there in the world, the press reigns supreme when it comes to moving markets and influencing buyers, and prices too. All too often hyperbole leads to inevitable meteoric price hikes. So why wouldn’t these powerful publications focus on real winemakers that are making real wine and incite and compel their readers to begin trading up? This makes much more sense to me rather than pimp questionable quality, mass-produced wine by maybe raising scores and catering to phantom readers that presumably can no longer afford a $30 bottle of wine. The notion is truly ridiculous and I’m almost embarrassed for Wine Spectator.

Add to this WS’s Top 100 Wines of 2009. The year’s top 10 wines totaled a $475 release price for all ten wines. Compare this to $698 in ’08, $998 in ’07 and even $1158 in 2005. Well, you see the trend. Can cheap wines really be that good and do they really deserve a spot in the limelight? The wine of the Year in 2009 was unbelievable (and I mean this in the worst sense of the word): 2005 Columbia Crest, Cabernet Sauvignon, Columbia Valley, Reserve with a release price of $27. Not only does this wine not deserve to be Wine of the Year, in my opinion, it did not even deserve to be in the Top 100 or Top 1000 for that matter. Four of us (all of us have wine knowledge) sat at a table recently and ordered up a bottle out of curiosity. Three out of four could not finish even one glass of wine. I kept going out of fascination and finally got it down – but only one glass. We’re not wine snobs, we just enjoy good wine and this wasn’t one of them. Personally I would not have scored this wine more than 88 or 89 points but Spectator scored it at 95 points! It wasn’t but a few short years ago that I would never have imagined many of these wines to show up on, what used to be, the prestigious list of Wine Spectator’ Top 100.

I’m sad to loose such an old, reliable friend as Wine Spectator but I can no longer support their platform of pawning off poor quality wine because they think they are somehow appealing to their readers.  95% of the Top 100 wines are not outstanding at all and are undeserving of such media attention, while other truly great estates that need help and support, suffer at the hands of our economy.

I think by not spending $50 to renew my subscription for print (I am however maintaining the electronic subscription to access their database of older vintages), I’ll buy a nice bottle of wine from a winemaker that does deserve my attention. As far as bloggers vs. print media, ultimately this may be a biblical David and Goliath type story – you know the ending . . .

David