2009
Points of Terroir
Reprinted from “The World of Fine Wine” Issue 23, 2009, pp31–32 where my article was first published.
I must commend “The World of Fine Wine” for its in-depth range of subjects and writing. I like it too, because of how it reports on wines. Take for example the report on the Barbaresco wines1: Barbaresco 2004. A detailed and interesting article on these wines is followed by very readable tasting notes from three top reviewers. These tasters clearly see the wines from different points of view but, reading the three descriptions on any one of the wines allows one to interpolate to give a very nice and quite sufficient picture of what they had in front of them. Their scores are also included and I am not the slightest bit surprised that these are more divergent – inevitably 2–4 points out of 20 apart for the 48 wines, indicating differences in individual preference rather than any consistent bias in the way they are scored. Full marks for publishing all the scores.
“...It is clear the texts give us a good handle on how the wines appeared and that the scores mostly have little significance except for the writers who scored them...“
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