86 Points Robert Parker
Bought a bottle of Storks Tower Tempranillo Shiraz 2007 from Tesco. It was cheap and tasty with lots of bright, focused, well defined fruit. Good modern Spanish style, and it went down well with our friends (we're camping for a few days in the south west).
What surprised me about it was that it had a gold sticker saying '86 Points Robert Parker'. How many people shopping for £6 wine in Tesco have heard of Robert Parker? [He's much more widely quoted in the USA.] Also, it's not Robert Parker who gave it 86 points, but Dr Big Jay - and 86 seems like a low score for him. And this leads me on to the final point: who boasts about 86 points in this era of grade inflation?
posted by Jamie @ 11:38 AM
17 comments
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17 Comments:
Weird! That said Jamie, chances are I'd enjoy an 86 point Parker wine a lot more than a turbo-charged 96 pointer. Though that is an even more obsure reference to try to make on a supermarket shelf!
This episode tells us the tricks used by supermarkets in selling their wines. I think that this is not even legal...
Italyabroad.com
anonymous - why would it be illegal? A very modest boast, but hardly against the law. And was it the supermarket or the producer? Someone stuck it on the bottle, and it wasn't the supermarket buyer, presumably
Please advise on the best place to buy "Monty's Red" THANK YOU.
Adnam's sell it in the UK
disclaimer -no finacial interest!
http://cellarandkitchen.adnams.co.uk/page/monty-waldin
Agree that few people who know Parker would brag about an 86 point wine but chances are I'd prefer it to the big 96 point monsters. Perhaps Tesco's know about the Bobby P backlash and it promoting wines are are good but not great according to his (group's) scores.
... I would imagine the general public would see 86 points out of 100 and think this must be pretty special. They wouldn't have a clue that water (or urine!) would score 50+
They'd (reasonably?) expect an average wine to score 50 and hence this would seem highly rated.
However that said, that sticker will have secondary interest to the little red 'Sale' label on the shelf!
So how any Jamie points does it get?
Well, you bought it!
Considering that 86 points, or 85-89 points, means "Very Good" for Parker, I'm really glad that SOMEONE does give those wines their proper value and moves past the rubbish about 90+ points...
Must have been a typo and the actual score was 96. I can't recall Jay Miller scoring an Australian wine less than 90.
Sad to see racists like Jack Everitt still allowed such free reign on the web. Don't know what is worse - that he can't accept that Spain can make good commercial wine, that he does not accept that Spain is not part of Australia or that New Zealand can produce good winemakers. Time to leave the 1950's Jack and find out that Spain has a lot to offer. Oh, and your sad little comment about Jay shows what a nasty little man you really are.
86 points for a £3.99 sounds like a score worth raving about.
But on this website, every wine gets 80-95!
Interesting that someone points out that 'every' wine reviewed here gets 80-95 points.
I would suggest that Jamie probably (a) rarely buys terrible wine (b) prefers to write and share reviews about wine he's enjoyed rather than wine that he hasn't. - A positive attitude!
A few points:
It's not the supermarket that put the sticker on the wine, but the producer.
I bought it because I know the wine, and like it - it's made with the consulting help of Sam Harrop, who I know reasonably well, and I think he's done a good job here. It would get 85 JG points, I reckon. So Dr BJ wasn't wrong, although I'm not in agreement with some of his more elevated scores.
Jess T, thanks for the support. Yes, most of the wines reviewed on the blog get quite high scores because they are a selected sample of the many, many wines that I get to taste.
How many of us ever drinks a wine that gets a lot less than that putative 85 points?
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