Cory Cartwright in the NY Times!

originally posted by SFJoe:
zzzzzzzzz.
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You people have no taste. Out of just the kind of interchange Keith and I are having emerged one of the great modern, spiritual autobiographies: Cardinal Newman's Apologia pro Vita Sua. And since I am playing Kingsley to Keith's Newman, he has all the chances of doing something great if he just hangs on.
 
originally posted by Cory Cartwright:
originally posted by Larry Stein:
Cory, I do have a question on the properties you mention above. Given your recent blog on "freshness" (yes, it is gonna come back and haunt you...), do you sense that those wines are going to age into something of interest, or will they simply taste older after some cellaring time? By older, I mean wines that lose some of their youthful structure, but don't develop the complexities that one (at least, me) seeks?

When (and if I ever again) purchase bottles of Bordeaux, I'm not seeking youthful exuberance. I want to cellar them. If I want freshness (sounds like a word for some fucking deodorant ad), there are other wines for that.

Congrats on the article!
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The thing is, if you ever buy Bordeaux again, will you be buying most of what's made now? I realize there are wines for drinking young and wines for cellaring (my point was that often times they can be the same) but do you think the stuff being put out now will age at all?
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I thought that Asimov missed the point about aging Bordeaux. It normally requires that, and restaurants and wine bars tend not to serve aged wines (except at astronomical markups). So you got a drink that shows best after 10 to 15 to 20 years and thus does not compete all that well with a wine designed for early drinking.

Otherwise, the argument splits and it depends on who you ask. Many a wine geek will object to the current crop of Bordeaux that are made in a riper extracted style, perhaps even with Reverse Osmosis. But these are made this way in part to be drinkable at a younger age, and thus "wine bar ready". So you have a good contingent of wine geeks rejecting these in favor of fresher, more detailed wines. Or there are the people (most of the wine-drinking "public") who don't like Bordeaux because of its early tannic and backward profile. I don't think Asimov really addressed this split either...
 
originally posted by Keith Levenberg:
originally posted by Jonathan Loesberg:
Reading high Parker scores as bad and low Parker scores as good is as silly as the reverse. If you've never liked a wine he also liked, then you aren't judging wines, only him.
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It would only be silly if experience didn't validate that reading, but in fact ample experience confirms that virtually every non-first growth since the 2003 vintage that he either verbally praises or scores above 92 is unpleasant and unclaretlike, and virtually every winery he has condemned as "not what it used to be" is, in fact, exactly what it used to be. To ignore this experience solely to give the benefit of the doubt to Parker's palate would be silly.
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You have tasted these? I have backed off on Bordeaux buying, so I don't know for sure, and I was starting to wonder after comparing notes on the 2009 Pontet Canet (Parker versus Ian d'Agata, for example). But I have had a few 2004 Bordeaux that still showed as "claret-like", although maybe they were scoring under 92 points or so...

There does seem to be a trend toward bigger and bigger wines, although I am not sure how much of this is spoofing versus climate change. But the scores keep creeping up in the Wine Advocate (again, check out Pontet Canet over the years), so there is no doubt that this is the style of wine that Parker prefers...
 
originally posted by Carl Steefel:
originally posted by Keith Levenberg:
originally posted by Jonathan Loesberg:
Reading high Parker scores as bad and low Parker scores as good is as silly as the reverse. If you've never liked a wine he also liked, then you aren't judging wines, only him.
Click to expand...
It would only be silly if experience didn't validate that reading, but in fact ample experience confirms that virtually every non-first growth since the 2003 vintage that he either verbally praises or scores above 92 is unpleasant and unclaretlike, and virtually every winery he has condemned as "not what it used to be" is, in fact, exactly what it used to be. To ignore this experience solely to give the benefit of the doubt to Parker's palate would be silly.
Click to expand...
You have tasted these? I have backed off on Bordeaux buying, so I don't know for sure, and I was starting to wonder after comparing notes on the 2009 Pontet Canet (Parker versus Ian d'Agata, for example). But I have had a few 2004 Bordeaux that still showed as "claret-like", although maybe they were scoring under 92 points or so...

There does seem to be a trend toward bigger and bigger wines, although I am not sure how much of this is spoofing versus climate change. But the scores keep creeping up in the Wine Advocate (again, check out Pontet Canet over the years), so there is no doubt that this is the style of wine that Parker prefers...
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I haven't tasted Pontet Canet since the mid nineties, but over on the Parker board, Jeff Leve used to carry on about how much the winemaking had "improved" there (and Parker seemed to agree when he said anything). So Pontet Canet's higher scores may have as much if not more to do with shifts in winemaking as it does with global warming.
 
originally posted by Jonathan Loesberg:
originally posted by Carl Steefel:
originally posted by Keith Levenberg:
originally posted by Jonathan Loesberg:
Reading high Parker scores as bad and low Parker scores as good is as silly as the reverse. If you've never liked a wine he also liked, then you aren't judging wines, only him.
Click to expand...
It would only be silly if experience didn't validate that reading, but in fact ample experience confirms that virtually every non-first growth since the 2003 vintage that he either verbally praises or scores above 92 is unpleasant and unclaretlike, and virtually every winery he has condemned as "not what it used to be" is, in fact, exactly what it used to be. To ignore this experience solely to give the benefit of the doubt to Parker's palate would be silly.
Click to expand...
You have tasted these? I have backed off on Bordeaux buying, so I don't know for sure, and I was starting to wonder after comparing notes on the 2009 Pontet Canet (Parker versus Ian d'Agata, for example). But I have had a few 2004 Bordeaux that still showed as "claret-like", although maybe they were scoring under 92 points or so...

There does seem to be a trend toward bigger and bigger wines, although I am not sure how much of this is spoofing versus climate change. But the scores keep creeping up in the Wine Advocate (again, check out Pontet Canet over the years), so there is no doubt that this is the style of wine that Parker prefers...
Click to expand...

I haven't tasted Pontet Canet since the mid nineties, but over on the Parker board, Jeff Leve used to carry on about how much the winemaking had "improved" there (and Parker seemed to agree when he said anything). So Pontet Canet's higher scores may have as much if not more to do with shifts in winemaking as it does with global warming.
Click to expand...
Pontet-Canet made an excellent 1986 (caution: I've not tasted the wine in years). In the late 1990s and through 2001, I had several debates with the matre de chai about the use of malo in barrel and RO; he always defended it, I told him it gave shit wine. In 2006 at a CIVB tasting in San Francisco, I tasted a 2004 Pontet-Canet that was classic. They told me there that they had abandoned those practices. I've not tasted P-C since then, so I can't say whether that was only for 2004 or continues, and the website is of no help.
 
originally posted by Jonathan Loesberg:
originally posted by Keith Levenberg:
originally posted by Jonathan Loesberg:
Reading high Parker scores as bad and low Parker scores as good is as silly as the reverse. If you've never liked a wine he also liked, then you aren't judging wines, only him.
Click to expand...
It would only be silly if experience didn't validate that reading, but in fact ample experience confirms that virtually every non-first growth since the 2003 vintage that he either verbally praises or scores above 92 is unpleasant and unclaretlike, and virtually every winery he has condemned as "not what it used to be" is, in fact, exactly what it used to be. To ignore this experience solely to give the benefit of the doubt to Parker's palate would be silly.
Click to expand...

Even your list of wines you consider not to have changed falsifies your claim since Parker has reviewed numbers of them well (if not above 96). I wasn't arguing for giving Parker any benefit of the doubt, just for not making overinflated claims that everything he says is just "not." If that were true, one could use him as a reliable reviewer.
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I guess I would agree with Jonathan here. While I am increasingly suspicious of the recent ratings of Parker with regard to Bordeaux, I would not go so far as to take a completely contrarian view in that regard either. He continues to rate at least moderately well some fairly traditional producers (OK, they don't get the big scores). On the other hand, I would not miss the opportunity (if I had it ) to check in on a few he has dissed a while back (Pichon Lalande a few years ago)...
 
originally posted by Jonathan Loesberg:
originally posted by Carl Steefel:
originally posted by Keith Levenberg:
originally posted by Jonathan Loesberg:
Reading high Parker scores as bad and low Parker scores as good is as silly as the reverse. If you've never liked a wine he also liked, then you aren't judging wines, only him.
Click to expand...
It would only be silly if experience didn't validate that reading, but in fact ample experience confirms that virtually every non-first growth since the 2003 vintage that he either verbally praises or scores above 92 is unpleasant and unclaretlike, and virtually every winery he has condemned as "not what it used to be" is, in fact, exactly what it used to be. To ignore this experience solely to give the benefit of the doubt to Parker's palate would be silly.
Click to expand...
You have tasted these? I have backed off on Bordeaux buying, so I don't know for sure, and I was starting to wonder after comparing notes on the 2009 Pontet Canet (Parker versus Ian d'Agata, for example). But I have had a few 2004 Bordeaux that still showed as "claret-like", although maybe they were scoring under 92 points or so...

There does seem to be a trend toward bigger and bigger wines, although I am not sure how much of this is spoofing versus climate change. But the scores keep creeping up in the Wine Advocate (again, check out Pontet Canet over the years), so there is no doubt that this is the style of wine that Parker prefers...
Click to expand...

I haven't tasted Pontet Canet since the mid nineties, but over on the Parker board, Jeff Leve used to carry on about how much the winemaking had "improved" there (and Parker seemed to agree when he said anything). So Pontet Canet's higher scores may have as much if not more to do with shifts in winemaking as it does with global warming.
Click to expand...
Yes, it could be, but I get a little nervous when I read these descriptions that make the Pontet Canet sound increasingly rich and perhaps extracted. And then see a distinctly lower rating from Ian d'Agata. Hard to say without tasting a few more of them. But Tesseron and crew have been making the Pontet Canet since 1994, so I don't know what exactly they would have changed in the last couple of years. Pontet Canet is great terroir, however, just over the road from Mouton, with perhaps the thickest section of gravel in Pauillac...
 
originally posted by Claude Kolm:
In 2006 at a CIVB tasting in San Francisco, I tasted a 2004 Pontet-Canet that was classic. They told me there that they had abandoned those practices. I've not tasted P-C since then, so I can't say whether that was only for 2004 or continues, and the website is of no help.
Click to expand...
Yes, I had the 2004 Pontet Canet and agree it was classic, and very good. 2005 received the highest ratings from the critics (up until the 2009 from Parker, which was given only 91 points by d'Agata, who hoped for a bit more "precision") but I would be interested to see if the style changed.
 
FWIW Pontet Canet is practicing and may even be certified Bio Dynamic. They did however make a commercial decision to do something non BD in 07 or 08 to save the crop but express some regret now and don't plan to do that again. (a wink or eyeroll emoticon could work here) I don't know what they do in the cellar.

Parkers praise may be a case of them just happening to hit his preferences without really trying.
 
Watch out, US hipsters, your time is coming.

savethedate_01.jpg
 
originally posted by Sharon Bowman:
France hit by Bordeaux outreach to younger setWatch out, US hipsters, your time is coming.
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Ooooh, Bordeaux and French Rock 'n' Roll. What's not to love?

Mark Lipton
 
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