originally posted by D. Zylberberg:
originally posted by Jonathan Loesberg:
So now that you at least stipulate the possibility that the argument about aging Texier's wines may be relevant to a full evaluation (and I would equally admit that we all evaluate young wines as best we may and register those evaluations in posts on wine boards), we can go on to the next step. Just as there is an obvious distinction between disliking someone's wines and criticizing the winemaker as a human being, there is an obvious distinction between registering one's disagreement with a prevailing opinion and explaining that disagreement in terms of some form of group think or peer pressure. I have no doubt that these things exist, and that they more than occasionally do play a role in the shaping of opinion. Indeed, so do a lot of people here, I expect when it comes to thinking about the effect of Parker on tastes in wine. Even if that were more massively true than it is, however, it is obviously arguing in bad faith to take one's own statement of taste to be motivated only by taste and to take the taste of those who disagree with you as motivated by some other external factors. You can't know it to be true and assuming it to be true doesn't lead to any interesting exchange in views, only the kind of vituperation going on here.
And as a matter of information, if you do a full search here and (were it only possible) on Wine Therapy, you'd find a fair number of adverse responses to particular Texier wines, even, amazingly enough, by those who like others. So for instance, excepting the CdPs, I'm not a big fan of the Southern CdRs I have tasted. I am a very big fan of the Brezemes and the 09 St. Julien (the only one I have tasted yet). By the way, this has as its logical consequence that the taste of people who have expressed adverse reactions to some wines can't really be explained well by the accusation of group think.
But of course if you had written a post that said, "I don't like the Texier wines I have tasted. What do others see in it?" rather than "Do Texier wines suck," then we couldn't all have had this wonderfully enlightening exchange.
I don't think my views are motivated purely by taste at all - we all have our biases. However, I absolutely thnk that the view of Texier wines on this board are basically irreparably colored, not just by groupthink but in particular, by Texier's social relationships with posters and his attractive narrative about the way he makes his wine.
And I'm aware of the fair number of adverse responses to particular Texier wines. In fact, that was one of the datapoints (so to speak) underlying my post - there are a LOT of adverse reactions to Texier wines taken individually, even here, but at least in this group, all those adverse reactions are explained away so that the narrative remains undisturbed - this bottle was off; that bottle was corked; this bottle was tired because it was under the wrong type of closure; that bottle is before Eric got the hang of that particular vineyard; this bottle is when his style was still evolving, etc etc. No one questioned the broader idea, which was, compared to other peer producers of wines from the Rhone, taking in the good wines and the bad wines, is Texier a good producer?