Here’s a little tidbit you may not know about Black Sears: we don’t submit our wines for ratings or scores. We are often contacted by reviewers from the top publications of these numbers from 1-100, and we even host them for tastings here at the winery from time to time. But we ask them not to publish any ratings on our wines.
Now, anyone, anywhere, professional or amateur, critic or run-of-the-mill alcoholic can publish a review of any wine, anytime, anywhere they like. We still mostly have our first amendment rights. But the pros mostly comply with our requests (more on that later), and as for the normies… we love to see everyone’s ratings online in democratic, crowd-sourced, non-gate-kept places like CellarTracker, Vivino, WineBersekers, Reddit even. Those crowd-sourced ratings and reviews are very much not what we are railing against. They’re actually kind of where our bread is buttered, to be honest.
“But guys!” you might be thinking… “your wines are Amazing… And you’re at the top of Howell Mountain - one of, if not the most acclaimed AVA (American Viticultural Areas) in all of Napa Valley! And your winemaker – Thomas Rivers Brown, does any winemaker anywhere get higher scores than that guy does? What are y’all thinking?! You could charge more! You could sell more! You could make more money and be more famous!”
Yeah, we guess. Cool.
Look, there are like 500 bonded wineries in the Napa Valley, alone. Wines are grown in at least 70 countries, and the interwebs tells us that there are somewhere between 150-200k wineries in the world! That’s a lot of wineries. Where does one even begin? Scores and ratings can be a very valuable jumping-off point for what can be an intimidating and overwhelming hobby, this wine collection and consumption thing. If a pro said it’s “perfect,” it’s probably worth buying. Your friends are probably going to like it (and if they don’t, well they’re “wrong,” objectively speaking, and you can dunk on them). We get it.
But the effects the ratings have had on the industry as a whole, and on wine styles and pricing in particular, are something we think… isn’t great. It definitely isn’t perfect. We give it… I don’t know, let’s go with a 57.
What Robert Parker's 100-Point Scale Did to the Industry
Prior to the late 70s and the introduction of Robert Parker’s 100-pt scoring system through his newsletter The Wine Advocate, wine criticism as a formal practice was pretty uncommon – mainly the purview of European sommeliers and connoisseurs using more binary (“good” or “bad”) language along with what most of us would call “tasting notes” these days. There was very little differentiation in terms of “quality” as indicated by some formal, objective scale.
But in 1978 Mr. Parker created just such a scale and modeled it off of the American school system’s grading scale, where 100 = Perfection, and anything under 70 is a FAIL. This made it immediately intuitive to the American consumer, and thus it became immensely popular and influential, eventually spreading across the globe.
At first, it was genuinely democratizing. Like we says, it provided a shorthand for ordinary consumers to navigate an intimidating world of French appellations and Italian DOCs without needing years of experience or a technical wine vernacular. However, the side-effects were profound. (It’s always those dang side-effects and pesky unintended consequences!)
The Cult Wine Formula
The main beef we bring is with the resulting price distortions that have had such a profound effect on the industry, particularly in Napa. A single point on this scale, particularly if said point is pushing a wine into the rarefied air of 98-100pts became worth enormous amounts of money. Think $50 in bottle price per point for a 96 vs a 95 in Napa, and exponentially higher for those perfect scores. Wines that scored 100 – initially quite rare, but increasingly common these days – fetched enormous sums and became speculative assets wholly divorced from drinking value for collectors. Secondary markets popped up, further inflating prices. And the “smart money” began flowing into wine as an investment in the portfolio, rather than something visceral to be shared in communion and celebration.
Suddenly the industry was dominated by the “cult wine” phenomenon, where some small producers discovered that scarcity, manufactured or otherwise, coupled with a 100-pt rating could create instant waiting lists, instant velvet ropes, and price tags that included four digits to the left of the decimal point. Egos were stoked.
By the 90s and early 2000s, new entries into the field began to look for the “cult wine formula,” which meant a handful of top winemakers, vineyard sites (Oakville) that catered to the particular “tastes” of the most prominent and influential critics, and winemaking styles that incorporated overly-ripe, high-alcohol, overly-oaked juice in thick glass bottles. In a few instances, some “vintners” even went so far as to sue winemakers who failed to deliver a 100-point score from the formula. (Gross!) Suddenly the entire industry was being dragged in a new stylistic direction that had little or nothing to do with wines’ sense of place or how wine is actually consumed. Non-Cabernet varietals were pulled out and re-planted to Cab at an alarming pace, bottle prices began to soar, with even lower-quality wines tracking higher on proximity to perfection, and the homogenization of Napa (and beyond) was well underway.
These days there’s a genuine revolt against these trends, particularly among younger wine consumers who do care about a wine’s terroir, who appreciate different varietals and winemaking styles, and who, perhaps most importantly, just aren’t going to (be able to?) spend thousands for a sticker that says “100” that they can put on their piss in the morning. Producers like Matthiason and Kongsgaard and Hayfork are developing reputations of their own for creating masterpiece wines from “odd” grape varietals you may have never heard of. And the wine industry as a whole is in the midst of a major price correction as consumers move away from treating wine as an asset that appreciates rather than a divine elixir that lets us do the appreciating.
Besides, what IS the difference between a 97 pt wine and a 100 pt wine? F*ck if we know… the whole notion of attaching a number to something so intrinsically subjective and ever-evolving was doomed from the start.
The Integrity Problem
And what about the integrity of the ratings? We do know for a fact that some producers, “submit wines for scores” a little differently than the way one might imagine (a table of bottles in unmarked brown paper bags, perhaps?). One producer we know, prior to receiving their scores, hosted Robert Parker at their home with their private chef and a menu paired specifically for the wines to be rated. Cuban cigars and cognac were shared after the meal. And in a shocking turn of events, those wines received the coveted 100-pt scores. One has to wonder if the same bottles tasted blindly alongside 20 other wines would have delivered such a “perfect” wine experience.
The Zinfandel Question
A couple years ago, we asked a professional critic for Wine Spectator who tasted with us about why the highest scored Zinfandel ever (the 1997 Turley “Black Sears Vineyard” Single Vineyard Designate) only received a 97 and not a 100. He told us that the last three points were for “ageability,” and that Zinfandel just “doesn’t age as well.” So, Chris asked if they ever re-tasted and re-rated any of the wines rated 100 a decade or more after the initial rating to confirm this “ageability” concept. He said simply, “nope.” Which is ironic since many of the wines built to score well using the ‘cult wine formula” have been so heavily manipulated that they fall apart shortly after the rating takes place, often before they even land in purchasers’ cellars, and usually before they are consumed. One has to imagine that many “perfect” bottles purchased as investments may never be consumed at all!
We gave this particular critic a bottle of our 2013 Black Sears Estate Zinfandel, 11 years from the vintage date, and told him he might want to rethink that whole notion. Because the “ageability” concept is what prioritizes Cabernet over all other varietals. The Black Sears Zinfandel is considered by many… most… to be (among?) the best Zinfandel there is. Yet a ton of our Cabernet fetches well over 2x what the market will pay for a ton of Zinfandel – a situation that makes it pretty difficult to justify a Zin vineyard on Howell Mountain. Is there something inherently better about one grape over another? Something ethereal and touched by the hand of God? Or is this the result of some other, more profane critical hand being applied to the scales of grape justice?
We aren’t saying that we don’t love Cabernet Sauvignon, or that our Zinfandel is somehow “better” than our Cabernet… we love all of our wines and our children equally, and we celebrate them for their uniqueness as well as their quality. But the result of all this scoring is this huge, largely unjustified, price discrepancy between varietals, and the inevitable “Cabernetzation” of an increasingly homogenous Napa Valley.
The One Time We Were Rated
Oh, almost forgot… the one wine we did have (accidentally) rated and published… we said “there’d be more on that later,” and this is later. It was the 2009 Black Sears Estate Zinfandel – from the year Chris and Ashley were married at the top of the Zin vineyard. This publication was doing a piece for their “Buyer’s Guide” on a neighbor’s winery that happened to purchase our Zinfandel grapes for their own Black Sears SVD Zin at the time. So, unbeknownst to us, our neighbor gave them a bottle of ours along with their own…
Their own Black Sears SVD bottling received a 95 pt rating and first-runner-up in the publication’s “Year’s Best Zinfandel” category.
Ours received a 96 and the top spot. (shoulder-shrug emoji)
The publication then demanded a fee if we wanted our label or website printed along with the rating. (eye-roll emoji)
Who knows? Maybe we are overly influenced by our Gen-X sensibilities and a notion of Keepin’ it Real that borders on the pathological. Maybe selling out, both literally and figuratively, is the ultimate endgame of the whole wine dream after all, and we are just own-goaling our way into obscurity. Maybe we too could be rich and famous and associated with cults and perfection and ascots and linen pants like the big ballers with the remarkably supple tannins. If only we played the game…
Maybe it’s because we used to live in Seattle? We saw what fame and fortune did to Cobain.
Here we are now, entertain us.
