The Wine Savant: A Guide to the New Wine Culture by Michael Steinberger

powerful incentives to bump up their scores. High scores are catnip for retailers, who use them to flog wines via shelf talkers and e-mail offers. In turn, those citations are excellent free publicity for critics. In a crowded marketplace for wine information, big numbers can help a critic to stand out, and I don’t think there is any doubt that score inflation has become rampant. Just look at Parker himself: for the 2010 and 2009 vintages in the northern Rhône Valley of France, he gave out seventeen 100-point ratings. This came not long after he awarded nineteen 100-point ratings to the 2009 vintage in Bordeaux and eighteen 100-point scores during a retrospective tasting of the 2002 Napa vintage. In a ten-month span, Parker gave out fifty-three 100-point ratings. Who knew perfection was so pervasive? When every wine these days seems to get 90 points just for showing up and scores in the mid- and high 90s are given out like candy on Halloween, it is hard to assign much credibility to ratings—and it appears that fewer and fewer consumers and merchants are taking them seriously (a growing number of wine stores nationwide are now point-free zones).
    Does that mean you should never trust ratings? No. If you can find a critic whose taste in wine more or less aligns with yours, then by all means use his or her scores. If two or three critics agree that a particular wine is brilliant, there’s probably some wisdom in that crowd. But just recognize that grade inflation is everywhere these days, and just because Parker or the Spectator gushes about a wine, that doesn’t necessarily mean that you are going to gush about it. Caveat emptor, as they say.
    V INTAGE: D OES I T M ATTER?
    If you carry around a vintage chart in your wallet, here’s a suggestion: throw it out. For one thing, vintage summaries are easily found on smartphones and tablets, so there’s no need to keep cluttering up your wallet. More importantly, vintage charts are now meaningless. It used to be that there were good vintages and bad ones. These days, it seems, there are only good vintages and better ones. Thanks to improvements in winemaking and warmer, more consistent growing seasons, it now takes something truly cataclysmic—think biblical, think locusts and frogs—to ruin an entire harvest. Short of that, almost no vintage is without good wines. Yet as the qualitative differences between vintages have narrowed, the buzz over certain vintages has grown cacophonous. This seems to be a particularly American phenomenon. While Americans are arguably the savviest wine drinkers on the planet these days, we do have a tendency to fall prey to the Bright Shiny Object Syndrome—to swoon over extravagantly hyped vintages and to shun those that are not as highly touted.
    Sure, some extraordinary vintages deserve the hype they generate. In 2005, Bordeaux and Burgundy both produced incredible wines, two of the finest vintages that these regions have ever had. The most acclaimed wines were amazingly good, and not surprisingly, they were staggeringly expensive. (Case in point: in the early 2000s, I was able to buy Domaine Mugnier’s Musigny, a fabulous grand cru red Burgundy, for around $80 a bottle in France; when the 2005 Mugnier Musigny was released, its price instantly soared to $5,000 a bottle. Needless to say, I’m no longer a buyer of Monsieur Mugnier’s Musigny.) But 2005 yielded great wines at all price points, and fabulous Burgundies and Bordeaux were to be had for $25 and $30 a bottle. In the case of the 2005 vintage, it paid to believe the hype.
    But not all highly touted vintages merit the acclaim. For instance, the Wine Spectator gave the 2000 vintage in Italy’s Piedmont region a 100-point rating. But among Barolo and Barbaresco producers and collectors, the Spectator ’s rating was considered a bit of a joke. Yes, some excellent wines were produced in 2000, but it was widely agreed that 1996 and 2001 were