The Debate of the Century of Blind Tasting | "Factual Judgments" and "Value Judgments" in Wine Scoring

Back in April 2004, the "controversy of the century" between Robert Parker and Jancis Robinson revolved around the controversial Chateau Pavie 2003: when Jancis Robinson gave the prestigious Saint Emilion a 12/20 fail, wine merchants and enthusiasts around the world held their breath and waited for Robert Parker's response. As top wine critics, the two have long been at odds with each other about Chateau Pavie, but Robinson's score broke the peace completely. 12/20 is the lowest score on the JR scale, and it means clearly: faulty or unbalanced. Soon after, Parker announced a rare early rating, 96~100/100, and the wine review was full of off-the-chart, brilliant and other praise.

A series of verbal confrontations ensued: Parker questioned Robinson's neutrality, arguing that she had identified Pavie by the shape of the bottle in a blind tasting, and then maintained her usual abusive remarks against the winery, while Robinson naturally refuted the accusation and retorted, "Anything that doesn't match the world's most powerful taste buds is bad."

Robinson and Parker actually have a good personal relationship, and they are probably a little angry when they have such heated words.

With the gossip out of the way, let's get back to the point: how do we understand the huge difference in the scores of the two people on the same wine?

It is often said that Parker and Robinson have different tastes, with the former preferring a hedonistic style while the latter prefers delicate and restrained wines. However, from failing to 96~100, can such a gap really be explained by a simple "difference in taste"? What's more, when you think back to the WSET course you studied, didn't your teacher repeatedly tap on the blackboard to emphasize: "Quality is objective, and it has nothing to do with what style you like"?

Here, I would like to explain this problem with the "fact/value dichotomy" that is common in ethics.

"Whether 1+1 equals 2", "At what temperature does water freeze", "Does the earth revolve around the sun", these are all factual questions. These questions are the study of what it is, the value is irrelevant, and the answers are objective and unique, just to be discovered, so people tend to reach a consensus.

As for good and evil, good and bad, beauty and ugliness, etc., it is a question of value, and what it ought to be is discussed. Due to their own beliefs, experiences, and positions, the discussants subjectively generated their own perspectives on the problem from the fragments of countless facts, and it can be said that there was no common basis from the beginning, and often gave people the illusion of "talking about everything, but nothing at all". "Human nature is inherently good or evil" and "what is beauty" have not been discussed since the time of Aristotle and Confucius, and when human beings fly out of the solar system, they still debate whether "tofu brain should be sweet or salty". Therefore, people with a modicum of common sense will not expect to find the only answer in the discussion of the question of value.

The problem, however, is that we often confuse factual judgments with value judgments. For example, Xiao Ming told Xiaoice, "Large-scale statistics show that men's upper body strength is greater than that of women. Xiaoice replied, "Your statement is very unequal, who said that women are inferior to men?" This is a typical value first, because Xiao Ming only stated a factual judgment, and did not carry the value judgment that "upper limb strength determines gender superiority and inferiority". Nine times out of ten, the topics you see on the Internet that are forever quarreled are because of a mixture of facts and values.

Unfortunately, scoring a wine is a matter of both factual and value judgments.

If there is one outlier in the four criteria for judging the quality of wines: Balance, Length, Intensity, and Complexity, I think it would be "Balance".

The length, intensity, and complexity of the aftertaste are closer to "factual judgments", and it is often easier to reach a consensus on this. Although different people's senses are different, taking themselves as the starting point, whether the aftertaste is long, whether the flavor is strong or not, and whether it is complex or not can be judged relatively clearly after the standard is established. As long as the sense of smell is normal, Lafite must be stronger than the legend of Lafite.

As for balance, there is a lack of a uniform and clear standard. Many tasting systems, including WSET, describe balance as a balance, with "fruitiness and sweetness at one end and acidity and tannins at the other". In tasting practice, however, the balance range of the scales is surprisingly large. A flintstone-dominated, extremely acidic dry Riesling can be balanced, as can a syrupy-sweet, very low acidity Pedro-Ximenez. If you ask the teacher why, the teacher will most likely tell you that the judgment of balance needs to take into account the typicity of the variety and the production area, and that the PX with high sweet and low acid is balanced, while the Riesling with high sweet and low acid is unbalanced. When you think about it, the problem becomes terrifying: even if you are a humanoid tasting machine with extremely keen senses, you can't tell if a wine is balanced without knowing the variety and region of origin (not to mention the fact that "what the typicality of the region variety should be" is a difficult topic to tell). Since the criterion of equilibrium varies according to the object of observation, it is difficult to say that this is an objective criterion, so it can only be classified as a value judgment.

Returning to Pavie 2003, which Jancis Robinson considered faulty or unbalanced, we take a look at her tasting words. Although "writing wine tasting words is not one of Jancis Robinson's many talents" (not me saying it, Andrew Jefford said it, you go to him, I love JR), but this tasting is a full display of the British's talent for complaining:

"Completely unappetizing overripe aromas. Why? Porty sweet. Oh REALLY! Port is best from the Douro, not St.-Emilion. Ridiculous wine more reminiscent of a late-harvest Zinfandel than a red Bordeaux with its unappetizing green notes."

"An unappetizing, overripe aroma. Why? Port-like sweetness. Really, port wine is better from the Douro Valley than from Saint-Emilion. A ridiculous wine, with an unappetizing green flavor, more like a late-harvest Zinfandel than a Bordeaux red. ”

We know that Robinson and Parker are tasting the same wine, both blind tastings, and that they must have a keen sense of smell and taste as well-respected wine critics. In other words, their factual judgments of Pavie 2003 should be the same, presumably long length, pronounced intensity, and high complexity.

Then the question arises, and Jancis Robinson begins to value: Okay, you Pavie, you grew up in Bordeaux, France, why did your ass go to the Douro Valley in Portugal for a while, and then to California, USA?

We can imagine that if Jancis Robinson had tasted this wine in a blind tasting of an unlimited range of appellations, perhaps the score would have been much more forgiving.

Interestingly, a few years later, British wine writer Jamie Goode met Pavie 2003 in a blind tasting of any variety, and he scored 91 points, and after the answer was revealed, he said that it was indeed a Bordeaux.

Actually, I can understand JR's rating very well. When things cross our bottom line, they tend to provoke a strong emotional reaction and reject them altogether. Jancis Robinson may have a firm belief in what a Bordeaux should taste like (even in 2003, the hottest year ever), and when it comes to a wine like Pavie 2003, it's no surprise to "break the line". This also does not mean that other wine critics' scores are not affected by value judgments, but the results are not so obvious.

Finally, I would like to emphasize that "factual judgment" and "value judgment" are a very metaphysical binary division, and in the real world, facts and values are often entangled with each other, and we do not have the magic to separate or combine them at any time.

Of course, I don't think that wine critics should exclude value judgments such as aesthetics from wine reviews, but perhaps, for the specific purpose of "being more useful to the audience", wine critics try to make a moderate separation of fact and value. For example, focus on the quality of the fruit (e.g. health, ripeness, concentration) and the brewing process (e.g. whether there are defects, whether it maximizes the fruit's potential) when scoring the score, and then leave room for 3 emojis after the score - 3 hearts/smiley faces represent high aesthetic approval, and 3 black hearts/broken hearts/crying and laughing must not represent complete disapproval of the style.

So a Pavie 2003 review might look something like this:

93 (┳Д┳) (┳Д┳) (┳Д┳)

The 2003 Pavie has excellent fruit concentration and a very good winemaking process – and yet they have made such a ridiculous wine with such good fruit and such good craftsmanship. (If that's the case, the text is more exciting than the score)