As wine experts disagree, consumers’ taste buds flourish: how two experts rate the 2004 Bordeaux vintage

In the rating of 184 2004 Bordeaux wines, Jancis Robinson (JR) and Robert Parker (RP) showed: complete agreement on only 71/184 or 39% of the wines; for 110 of the remaining 119 wines, RP assigned a higher rating than JR. RP scored: 51 wines as EXCELLENT that JR rated as ABOVE AVERAGE; 38 as ABOVE AVERAGE that JR scored as AVERAGE; 19 as EXCELLENT that JR scored as merely AVERAGE; and 2 wines as ABOVE AVERAGE that JR rated as BELOW AVERAGE. JR offers a plausible way for the consumer to make sense of the wine ratings of a given specialist, in the same way the consumer learns to ‘calibrate’ her/his subjective judgments to those made by designated experts in other fields of interest. Here Robinson [(1997). Tasting pleasure: Confessions of a wine lover. New York, NY: Penguin] treats expert judgments of wine as ‘… every bit as subjective as the judging of any art form’. Recent enological research indicates that this message needs to be understood in a broader socio-economic framework that focuses upon other im...