What is a "preference criteria" ?

If you still remember the situation when you wasn't an experienced taster, as a beginner you had not yet developed your criteria for judging wine in a strict way. A beginner might be very definite in what he like or dislike, but this changes whenever he discover new types of wine that he has not yet tasted. (If a beginner doesn't change when he gets new impressions, he will likely not learn anything at all, and we don't bother more about him in this article). So the beginner still has a lot of blind spots in the wine world and may be biased caused by the lack of adequate knowledge. Typically he can be fooled by charm and accessibility, and may reject a higher quality wine depending on misunderstanding of structure or immatureness. Often he likes the wines he is used to drink and dislike what is unfamiliar to him. But this is only a matter of time and confidence, and the more wine he tastes the more he learn and understand. And a result from understanding is also the ability to build expectations of how a wine ideally should be, and this is what I refer to as building up "preference criteria". For example, he recognise that, regardless of origin and type, a wine must have a certain level of fruitiness to be at all appreciated by him or he discover that oak most often add complexity and takes his liking.

In this early period, it is very beneficial for a beginner, if he gets some reliable external influences. Otherwise it is a big risk that he builds up preference criteria based on invalid or irrelevant arguments. For example, there is certainly a connection between price and quality of wine, but this relation is not often very straight and easy to understand. The risk is here, that the beginner connect his preference criteria to overpriced branded wines and neglect to learn anything from cheaper wines of unknown upcoming producers. Another risk is, for example, that he doesn't join or gather enough many people to afford buying expensive high quality wines, which result in establishing a too low horizon for quality and he miss to examine and understand the top end of the quality range. Additionally to this matter, the characteristics of high quality wine are often more clean-cut and obvious, which in fact makes it much easier to understand. (Don't try to learn to play guitar on a cheap instrument).

One type of good influence is to read other wine critics. By far the best is, if the beginner combine this study with buying the same wines as the critic has tasted, and pour it in glasses in front of him while he is reading the critic's note. He can then immediately compare his own opinion with the judgement from the critic. Preferably he should turn to more than one critic to get wider influences. I claim, that even if he risk to get brainwashed by too few critics, this is better then trying to learn everything himself by starting from a blank piece of paper.

The result from the above education is that you have built a set of preferences leading to establish a "preference criteria". Then, if you are asked to explain what is your preferences of wines, you do not have to refer to single bottles, but instead you can abstract your answer to e.g. "the fruit must outperform the sum of all other components in a wine". Or anything else from your own "preference criteria".

Which preference criteria is the best one ?

From this discussion it is also obvious that there are many sets of preference criteria. In fact, each taster and each wine critic have their own preference criteria. So the situation is impossible? Not quite, but almost.

I pick some different preference criteria that are common to many wine tasters to exemplify what I mean. There is the "proof is in the bottle" school of preference criteria, the "keep it moderate" school and the "fossil snobbism" school. The "proof is in the bottle" school have persons like Robert Parker in the lead. As this name hints, these group of wine tasters or critics always taste blind and assign points regardless of price, reputation, romanticisms and other external characteristics. The "keep it moderate" is a trendy school of preference criteria that is common in Sweden. Here a wine judgment must be very anchored within this school, and polite to the wine producer and pleasing to the Swedish monopoly. Finally, the "fossil snobbism" focus on the old world with long reputation, and claims the the new world do not have the right prerequisites for to catch up.

All of these schools have different preference criteria. As an example, take the label. The outlook and text on the label is irrelevant for the "proof is in the bottle" school, the label can be relevant for the "keep it moderate" if it show a highly regarded producer, and it is most significant for the "snobbism" school if  stating that the origin of the wine is Bordeaux or Burgundy. Another example of different preference criteria is level of fruit in the wine. For the "proof is in the bottle" the fruitiness is important and must be in par with (not lower then) all other wine components, for the "keep it moderate" the fruit level must be moderate (not too pronounced) and for the snobbism fruitiness it is not very important.

As you now understand, the preference criteria of a critic is important to know when you take advice from him (or a taster you know). If he has an "opposite" preference criteria than you have, you risk to get really mislead. For example, if you want to stand out as "fossil snob" and want to serve a Mercedes-type wine that impress your yuppie friends, you will get a disastrous advice of a totally unknown and cheap but mouth-coating wine from the "proof in the bottle" critic.

Some critics sometimes go together in a "tasting panel" to level out individual preferences criteria. Excellent wine critics have so much experience from tasting and are humble enough to imagine and apply to a "common preference criteria" within the panel. To create such panel, many face to face tastings must be arranged by the panel participants, to understand each other's individual preferences, in order to build up the panel "common preference criteria". It is very important that you have individuals from many opposite schools of criteria, so the panel really can fetch in all kind of individual criteria and to assemble them to an "appropriate common preference criteria" that is good enough to serve most people with wine judgements.

In this respect, wine critic is not different to any other critic. For example, one music critic love rock and roll and dislike jazz, another critic likes the reverse. Even if art critics have different preferences, most of them can agree to the common preferences that Rembrandt is quality art and kitsch is not.

My final point is that there are no single critic trend or preference criteria that is the right one. It is up to the person that take influence from a critic. If this person is satisfied with the advices he get, then the critic is successful with his mission. But now it seem easy to be a critic?

Consistency of a critic.

With consistency I mean all the prerequisites that a critic must manage to be reliable in his advices. He must

• have a classification system in order to compare and remember wine over time.
• define a set of fixed preference criteria to hold up any wine against.
• visualize and communicate his judgement in an understandable way
• preferably also communicate his fixed preference criteria.

Lack of consistency is sometimes evident, when a taster claims that a wine changes a lot in the glass. If a white wine go from a temperature of +5 degree Celsius to +20 within half an hour, certainly the wine change a bit. And aeration also change the wine a bit, but not to more than a slightly noticeable level during a tasting. The remaining change is most probably the taster that change his opinion during the tasting. Tasting is a difficult business and a taster are more than forgiven if he needs to reason with himself and other before he understand the quality of the wine. As long as the wine is not disclosed, a group discussion often do increase the quality of the judgement. But if the wine changes from poor to good when it is found to be an well known Bordeaux, you should be suspicious about the tasters consistency (if not profess to "fossil snobbism").

Another related topic is bottle variation. Bottles do vary for various reasons. For example, the condition of the storage environment influent a lot of how a bottle takes long term ageing. Also cheap wine, sold under fantasy names, can vary a lot between separate batches delivered from the producer at different times. And of course a cork defect is a significant random variation. But young quality wines from reliable producers do not vary much between bottles, and again it is most probable the taster that varies in his judgement.

Communicating my Preference Criteria.

On this site I have published a lot of my own tasting notes. I will here take on the challenge to express my own preference criteria. As you maybe have realised, I profess to the "proof is in the bottle" school. Below is my corner stones of my preference criteria. Note that the criteria is somewhat over-explicit in order to be clear for you :

How is Your preference criteria ?

The point with presenting my preference criteria is that I would like to save your expensive time. By reading this trough, you can now quickly catch the bases of my way of reasoning. So if you have a quite different preference than I have, you don't have to read a lot of my notes and by a lot these wines just for concluding that we in fact have very different preferences. On the other hand, if my preference criteria seems adequate for you, it is not unlikely that we like the same kind of wines and we can benefit a lot from exchanging wine advices.

What is quality ?

A wine that match the preference criteria is often said by the critic to be of good quality, and one may argue if it is meaningful when this word is so different for different persons. For example, a "fossil snob" can be very excited by a Bordeaux bottle from a poor vintage or from a chateau property being in a slump. And if the wine hides its quality evidences, this critic just pinpoint the fact that it is not yet at its maturity top and claims that the simple solution is just to send the bottle off to another 20 years in the cellar. At the other end, the "proof is in the bottle" critics often claims that they know what quality stands for, but it is also risky to take his advices into account. For example, many upcoming producers can make a wine that is incredibly rich and charming, but there is no long term reputation for graceful ageing. The wine can mature in a less graceful manner, or the winery may run out of capability to support quality in the future. Finally, the Swedish "keep it moderate" school is superb for persons demanding both braces and waist belts, but I find this school to boring and limited.

How to communicate what wine you prefer ?

Point systems for preferences have been widely spread. Imagine that you had all wines from all over the world in glasses in front of your. Even if it would be a hard job, it would in theory be rather easy to arrange all of those wines in a line, starting with the wine you less prefer and ending with the wine you most prefer. To all wines you assign its number in the line, beginning with 1 for the less preferred, 2 for the next, etc. Then it is only for you to use this line position number in in all your tasting notes. In practice however, you can't of course taste everything at the same event and the position number will be immensely large in the line end where you prefer the wines. In practice you partition the line into segments and define an number (or symbol) for each of them. Often numbers are used for the segments, but also other symbols can be adequate. The most common systems is

• 50 to 100 points, with 1 point segment interval
• 1 - 20 points, with half point segment intervals
• 1 - 5 points (or stars) with one or half point (half star!) segment intervals

 This idea is simple and easy to understand, but has created a lot of discussions. There are of course the consistency problem referred above. The critic tastes wine at different time points under different conditions and have the challenge to always assign the same point for the same wine if to be considered as consistent.

Then there is a more ethic discussion, if it is acceptable to reduce a wine to just a number.

What is praiseworthiness ?

This is simply how much points a wine has been assigned divided with the price for this wine. It might be expressed in points per €, see the table below. From my cellar statistics I can get the following relations during 2002 - 2004 (points definitions from Robert Parker system):

As you can see, the price does not rise linear, but rather exponential when the point go high, or in other words, the price per point gets higher, the higher the points is.

If using a logarithmic scale on the price axis, see below, the praiseworthiness curves get almost linear. This is the best way to illustrate praiseworthiness, but maybe a bit mathematical to you.

If you now have (blind) tasted a wine and assign a point for it (between 90 and 100), you can go into this table and find out the degree of praiseworthiness. If the price you have paid is above the yellow axis, this is definitely expensive. If you get near the purple curve it is normal prices and if under the blue curve it is definitely a bargain.

There are a lot of symbols to assign on praiseworthiness. Maybe the most used is a minus sign (-) for expensive wine, an equal sign (=) for normal priced and a plus sign (+) for bargains. If the wine is a "super bargain" or a "super cost" then you often see that the plus and minus signs are doubled (++ and --) or even tripled (+++ and ---).