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 [Larger view] | Wine Spectator
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 The Magazine That Created The Modern Wine Snob | |
| Used to be on the most pretentious types walked around talking about vintages and vinyards and things like nose and legs and such. Thanks to Robert Parker and The Wine Spectator, now every pretentious yuppie with a few bucks can be heard to go on and on about "roasted plum scent" and "tobacco undertones" and other such pretentious rot. Stores have contributed to this mess, too; go into any wine shop or grocery and you'll see bottles with tags saying "Wine Spectator 87! Rasberries and Citrus!" and other nonsense. Truth of the matter is 90% of the wines found in The Wine Spectator will never be found in your local wine shop, so all these reviews are just fodder for pretentious yuppies. And in any case, wine is a personal and subjective matter that cannot be reduced to a simple number. Save the money you'd spend on this, and instead make friends with your loal wine merchant. He or seh will give you far better advice. Unless, that it, he or she is a fan of Parker.... | |
 Review of the Decade, 100 points! Oh please... | |
| Wine Spectator is the most prominent and widely available wine criticism magazine and as such it has been endlessly pilloried. Well, they deserve it - one recent issue's cover story was "Danny DeVito and Rhea Pearlman, Hollywood Power Couple!" How ridiculous can you get? The pages are littered with articles devoted to wealthy Californians and their extensive cellars; one recently spent an entire article on a rich man who helps his rich friends by cataloguing their cellars on, gasp, a spreadsheet! Yeah, it's like that. Wine Spectator has also been criticized for the way it uses hyperbole to the extent that no one believes them when they're right anymore. Oenophiles now wait for Robert Parker (Wine Advocate) to back them up before believing it. "Best Vintage since 1961" and "Vintage of the Century" and "Vintage of the Decade" are far too common copy, coming once a year or so. The vintner profiles hold some interest, but don't fool yourself, you read this magazine for the scoring. Wine Spectator has the resources to taste more wines than any other English language publication (that I know of) and despite some strange results, are generally good at evaluating the bottles in question. As I've noted elsewhere, in spite of the hyperbolic headlines, the Spectator is stingier than Robert Parker for rating wines "Outstanding." The caveat is that a lot of wines get bunched up in the 84-86 point range, although I suppose that matches my experience. By comparison to the Wine Advocate, I find Wine Spectator scores much more inconsistent. This makes sense because the Spectator has a larger staff and it's difficult to establish a common benchmark across all of the offices and tasting panels. In their favor, they do review a fair number of lower priced wines, more than their aforementioned colleague, and their reactions are more or less in the ballpark as to where I'd put them if I were doing the reviews. But know when using the Spectator to allow some give on either side, a confidence interval, if you will. It might be terrible that a magazine wastes its first three quarters of every issue on mindless fodder for social climbers. It might be tasteless that they spend so much time promoting the notion that wine is an investment, instead of an immensely enjoyable consumable commodity. But those of us with big brains and modest credit ratings know that there is much to be salvaged from the back of each issue. We also know that Parker is the first point of reference. | |
 Attractive magazine focusing on upmarket wines | |
| Wine Spectator is an enjoyable magazine that's well-laid out and often interesting to read. However, it mainly focuses on pricey wines (as it should, being a pricey magazine), and the articles about wine-related subjects like matching cheese with wine are sometimes lacking in depth. Still, it's a pleasant magazine which immerses its readers in the culture of wine, and each issue does highlight a few modestly-priced wines. |
