About the tasting arrangements

To celebrate our family wine cellar, a jubilee wine tasting is arranged each autumn. The theme for the tastings are 95+, meaning that the wines tasted had scored 95 or more out of 100 point by Robert Parker. The cause for such theme is

• To compare the quality level of wines of different types and from all around the world
• To verify if Robert Parkers judgements are consistent and reliable
• To just enjoy exceptional wines together with good friends

Over a dozen of the most skilled palates of southern Sweden are gathered for this tasting, see some pictures at the bottom of this page. Every even fifth year nobody knows anything about the offered set of wines. In odd years between each taster brings his own 95+ wine, thus he know one of the wines in the set.

No other facts are disclosed in advance and scores of each wine are decided and delivered totally blind from each participant. After that, my dear guests are allowed to discuss, guess and make blunders in order to enjoy myself.

The description of the wine is mostly fetched from my own protocol, supplemented with deviations from the group. For each wine, the Robert Parker point is presented leftmost in the headline. In the below text, my own scoring point is presented separate from the group-agreed point. In the case the group can not agree, the presented points are separated into different schools of judging norms.

About the tasting conclusion

Each 95+ tasting always ends with a conclusion. Generally as I see it, there are two aspects to consider when evaluate a wine critic :

• How comprehensible is the quality criteria (norm) applied by a critic.
• To what degree is the critic able to stick to his quality criteria (norm).

Quality criteria does varying between critics, for example the "adequate level of acidity". Some critics judge a certain acidity to be beneficial for a high point, whilst other means that the same acidity level is excessive and decreases the point. This aspect is a problem as long as you don't know the quality criteria (norm) applied by a wine critic. The norm is seldom explicit explained, so for a certain period of time you have to read judgements from the wine critic and compare that against the same wine tasted by yourself in order to understand how the wine critic reason and if you agree or disagree to that. For example, Parkers norm includes positive point-raising characteristics like high concentration, pureness, balance and genuineness and bad point-reducing characteristics like imbalance, flaw, dullness, dilution etc.

The inconsistency aspect is much more difficult to stand. If the wine critic change his norm without being aware of it, or if he is unable to compare each wine against his own norm, he don't get consistent with him self and this undermine his reliability.

The conclusion at the end of each 95+ tasting discuss how Robert Parker seem to fulfil the above criteria.

Finally, does it make sense to compare so different wines as we do ? Parker's own opinion about this kind of tastings is not quite clear to me.

• He seem to dislike such tastings by writing - When possible all of my tastings are done in peer-groups, single blind conditions, (meaning that the same types of wine are tasted against each other and the producers' names are not known).
• He seem to allow such tastings by writing - I know of no one with three or four different glasses of wine in front of him or her, regardless of how good or bad the wines might be, who cannot say "I prefer this one to that one".

Anyway, the 95+ tastings set out from the latter principle and is most educative and enjoyable.

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