Australia’s best wines?

There is something different this week in the blog, as it becomes personal, and I talk about my favorite Australian wines.

Australia's best red wine

I am sometimes asked what wines I like (eg. Some personal anecdotes). Well, I can tell you what is unequivocally my favourite red wine. It is the Wynns Coonawarra Estate Coonawarra Cabernet sauvignon.

As the name suggests, it originates in the Coonawarra region of south-eastern South Australia, and it is 100% Cabernet. The 2017 vintage is shown in this picture. You can see why it is sometimes called Black Label.

My wife and I had this particular bottle a couple of weeks ago, and it was absolutely superb (as I expected).

I am so glad that I can buy each new vintage when it is released, and that I can afford it. The current release is the 2022, and it costs less than $AUD40 ($USD25). Get yourself a bottle, and put it away for at least 5 years.

You can read a relatively recent retrospective tasting here: Wynns Coonawarra Cabernet – 60 vintages tasted (“Wynns makes one of the world’s best, and best value, cabernets”).

Note also that the region is currently celebrating 130 years of Coonawarra wine.

Australia's best white wine

I can now tell you what is unequivocally my favourite white wine. It is the Tahbilk Marsanne. (Note: it used to be called Chateau Tahbilk, back in the old days.)

It originates in the Nagambie Lakes region of central Victoria, and it is 100% Marsanne (from the largest holding in the world). The 2018 vintage is shown in this picture. One of the things I like about the wine is that it lasts forever, and therefore the winery has a first release of the wines at vintage, but also has a Museum Release, at 7 years or so of age. The latter will keep for at least another decade.

My wife and I had this particular bottle a few weeks ago, and it was absolutely superb (as I expected).

I am so glad that I can buy each new vintage when it is released, and also when the museum release appears, and that I can afford both of them. The current release is the 2023, and it costs less than $AUD25 ($USD15). The current Museum Release is the 2018, and it costs less than $AUD30 ($USD20).

You can read a retrospective tasting here: Tahbilk — retrospective tasting highlights unique wine style. We actually visited the winery a couple of weeks ago, and had the usual small tasting.

The most valuable wine brands over recent years

Things are a bit unsettled in the global wine world at the moment, for reasons of which you are presumably well aware. Instead of dealing with that, I thought that it might be more interesting to look at the value of the world’s most valuable wine companies / brands over the past few years. Some are up, some are down, and some are holding ground. Which are which?

The most recent data for wine brands come from Brand Finance for 2024. This company claims to have “the world’s largest database of brand valuations, with over 5,000 new valuations each year, supported by our own original consumer equity research.”

You can peruse a list of the wine data at VinePair for: The world’s 10 most valuable wine and champagne brands (2024). Given that title, it should surprise no-one that the four most valuable brands for 2024 are all from Champagne: Moët & Chandon, Chandon, Veuve Clicquot, and Dom Pérignon. Note that this refers only to individual brands, not to the conglomerates that own many of them (eg. Constellation, Pernod Ricard).

For our purposes here, though, we want to compare these 2024 data to the data for 2023. This I have done in the first graph. Each company is represented by a labeled dot — its value in 2023 is shown horizontally (in millions of $) and its value in 2024 vertically.

Clearly, the same four Champagne brands were at or near the top of the 2023 list as well. This should surprise no-one either, I guess, because France, as it often does with wine, leads the way.

More interestingly, there are only two large changes in value between the two years: Changyu has dropped significantly (second place to fifth place), and Yellow Tail has risen significantly (ninth place to seventh place).

Changyu is China’s century-old wine legend. Its drop in value has been noted in the media (Changyu brand value plummets 33% in a year):

This decline is likely due to the increasing competition from both domestic and international wine brands entering the Chinese market, which has put pressure on Changyu’s market position. Combined with weak financial performance over the past year, these factors have led to a decrease in Changyu’s brand value.

Yellow Tail, on the other hand, has become an Australian legend, developed by Casella Wines. The rapid worldwide success of this brand has been listed as a classic case study of what is referred to as a Blue Ocean Strategy. Blue Oceans are uncontested marketplaces; and it is claimed that the Casella brothers deliberately set out to make their own blue ocean: a fun and non-traditional wine that is easy to drink for everyone (Creating value on the vine). Indeed, it has subsequently been noted that retailers should: Range wines by colour rather than country of origin, which is another example of a consumer-friendly approach to wine retail. (That is, these days consumers think about wine from a style perspective.)

We should also look at the most valuable wine brands over several years. We can look at the 2021—2024 data in the second graph. We should note that Penfolds, Yellow Tail and Jacob’s Creek do not appear in the Top 10 for 2021 (Barefoot, Martini, and Concha y Toro appear, instead). Also, Beringer does not appear in the Top 10 for 2022 — its value for 2021 (not shown in the graph) was $300 million.

Note the rapid rise for Penfolds in 2023, and for Yellow Tail in 2024. Lindeman’s has had an erratic performance, up and down, as has Changyu. The wine industry is not always a static place to be, although the other six brands have been fairly steady through time.

Part of the problem here, of course, is global wine production (Champagne sales are slumping):

According to the latest macro analysis from the International Organisation of Vine and Wine (OIV), an intergovernmental body providing guidance to the wine and grape-growing industry, overall global wine production is now at its lowest point since the turn of the millennium ... the overarching trend for the past 25 years is a clear line sloping downward. Perhaps more menacingly, global wine consumption itself has reached its lowest point since 1996, according to OIV estimates.

In concluding on a happier note, I should remind you that the commercial value of a brand is not its only value. For example, the first large winery complex that I ever visited, in my late teens, was Seppeltsfield, established in the Barossa Valley (South Australia) in 1851 by the Seppelt family. What is equally notable is that the wine my wife and I had with our barbecue the other day was Seppeltsfield Shiraz 2019 (and very nice it was, too). Now that (nearly 5 decades) is continuous value for you!

Alcohol usage (and over-usage) around the world

You may never have heard of it, but there is a survey called the Global Drug Survey, which has been conducted annually since 2012. This year's report should be released in another month, or so. However, the results have not differed much for the past couple of years, so a look at last year’s results could be informative. Clearly, alcohol is one of the drugs studied.

This is claimed to be the world’s largest drug survey, intended “to promote honest conversations about drug use, and help people use drugs more safely regardless of the legal status of the drug.” The interest is not in the levels of use, per se, but in a comparison of use patterns and trends.

Available online are the Global Drug Survey 2021 Key Findings Report, and an Executive Summary. Here, I will extract some of the information as related solely to alcohol. In 2021, there were 32,000 respondents, from 22 countries (each with >160 participants). About one-third of the respondents were from Germany, followed by New Zealand and the United States.

Let’s start with rates of drug use. Here are the percentages of the 32,000 people who had used each of the listed drugs during the previous year. Clearly, alcohol predominates; but cannabis and tobacco both get more than 50% usage. Compare this to my youth, when huge numbers of people smoked tobacco, but no-one admitted to smoking cannabis, except university students!

As far as alcohol is concerned, the majority of the respondents were categorized as low-risk drinkers (on the Alcohol Use Disorders Identification Test, developed by the World Health Organization). This does not mean that people do not like a drink, or two. This next graph shows the number of days on which alcohol was reported to be consumed within the previous 12 months, for several of the countries.

There is nothing too unexpected there. The French drink on average every 3 days, and the Hungarians every 4 days. However, the Germans are below the global average; and the New Zealanders drink notably more often than do the Australians.

There is also, of course, the matter of getting drunk — defined as “having drunk so much that your physical and mental faculties are impaired”. This next graph shows the number of occasions, within the previous 12 months, reported by members of several of the countries. The survey average was 9 times, which is about once every 40 days.

Moreover, those Australians in the survey managed about twice the global average rate, with the Danes and Finns not that far behind, along with the Americans. The Germans, Spaniards and Italians clearly drink in moderation, along with the New Zealanders. That is, Australians drink less often than New Zealanders, but when they did drink they were more likely to keep drinking.

After getting drunk, it is always possible to feel regret about this activity. This next graph shows the percentage of occasions on which the participants “wished you had drunk less or not drunk at all.” This generally seemed to vary between about one-fifth and one-quarter of the occasions.

The Danes and Finns seem to have the fewest regrets, in spite of leading the way in drinking, while the Australians regretted much more — maybe this is why they drink less often than New Zealanders — they drink less often but get drunk more often, and then regret it. The Irish and Poles had the most regrets.

There must, of course, be a reason for having regrets, and a number of reasons were provided, as listed in the next graph. Each person was asked “to think back over the occasions they have regretted getting drunk and select their top three reasons for why this happened.” The graph shows the percentage of people who selected each reason as first, second or third. The lesson here is not to drink your alcohol too fast, nor to mix your drinks.

Getting drunk is never recommended. After all: 1 in 5 deaths of US adults 20 to 49 is from excessive drinking; and even: In young adults, moderate to heavy drinking is linked to higher risk of stroke. Worse still, we have been told that the: Alcohol death toll is growing, due to the ongoing pandemic.

You can have a drink or two, but not five or six.

Sicily turns up the (wine) heat

Obviously, I have a collection of Australian wines in my “cellar”, since those are the types of wines I grew up with. In addition to these, there is only one other region whose wines I have specifically tried to sample extensively, and that is Sicily.

This interest started from several holiday trips that my wife and I made to the island. There are many things to see there, from spectacular (often volcanic) scenery, to megalithic graves, to Ancient Greek ruins (the best of which are in Sicily and Turkey, not in Greece), and on to Late Baroque architecture (extensive in the south-east). More importantly, there are many places to sample mamma's home cooking, as well as the local wines.

So, I made an explicit attempt to acquire what wines I could get, from a wide range of online stores in the European Union. During 2015 to 2017 I managed to get 170 wines, many of which I am still drinking today. For example, we had a Benanti Etna Bianco 2017 with our Blue Mussels, plus Salmon patties, the other day.

I have, however, visited only five wineries — Gambino, Murgo, Florio, Benanti, and Gulfi. Of these, Gulfi is in the Hyblaean Mountains (Monti Iblei), which is the original home of the Nero d'Avola grape. This is the most common Sicilian variety now being trialed in New World vineyards. (Avola is the coastal port from which the wines were exported, just down the road from where Archimedes of Syracuse lived. It is also next to the town of Floridia, which recently set the highest temperature ever recorded in Europe.)

Of the other wineries that I have visited, only Benanti is on the lower slopes of Mount Etna, which is the region attracting most of the recent media attention for its wines. There are plenty of web reports (eg. Sicilian success: Producers on Mount Etna climb to greater heights with vigor and determination); and there is now a book, as well — The New Wines of Mount Etna: An Insider's Guide to the History and Rebirth of a Wine Region (2020) by Benjamin North Spencer.

Given the recent interest, it is not surprising that large-size comparative tastings have been appearing. The most recent of these comes from Stuart Pigott, at the James Suckling web site (Etna erupts in the glass as Sicily’s colorful wine plume spreads). The report has 353 wines rated from the island, with 118 (one-third) of them being from the Etna DOC.

The graph below shows the data for these wines, with the quality scores horizontally, and vertically a count of the number of wines at each score. The scores in red refer to the Etna wines, with the remainder being in blue.

Clearly, the Sicilian wines have done rather well, with an average score of 91.2 points (and a median of 91) — only five of the wines scored less than 86. This is better than the recent scores for 256 wines from New York state, with an average score of 90.2 points and a median of 90 (New York state of wine). However, it is not as good as the organic wines that I reported on recently (Do biodynamic wines taste better than organic wines?), with an average score of 92.1 points and a median of 92, nor the biodynamic wines, with an average score of 93.5 points and a median of 93.

More importantly for our purposes here, the Etna wines do better than the wines from the rest of Sicily, with an average score of 92.0 points (and a median of 92). Indeed, for all of the scores above 92, Etna has more wines recorded, even though it comprised only 33% of the sample. Four of the top five wines come from the Benanti winery, which I mentioned twice above — the report notes that this is “no surprise, given that the Benanti family has been one of the driving forces for Etna wines for more than 30 years.”

If you are interested in trying some of these wines, there is a follow-up report on: Great value wines: 10 Etna Rossos for under $40.

To be labelled Etna Rosso, the wines must be made from the varieties Nerello mascalese and Nerello cappuccio, of which Nerello mascalese is the main grape responsible for the interest in Etna wines. It has been tried elsewhere in Sicily, but nowhere else than Etna does it produce wines of distinction. It will be interesting to see how it goes on the other continents where it is now being trialed, as a producer of Pinot noir style wines.

Carricante is the main variety for wines labelled Etna Bianco, but it can also include Catarratto, Grecanico and Minnella. It is a welcome antidote to the sea of Chardonnay and Sauvignon blanc wines, with which the world-wide industry is currently awash. Indeed, stylistically, it reminds me of the unoaked whites of the Rhone Valley or Rioja, both of which have recently been championed:

• Why you should consider opulent white wines from the Rhône Valley
• In praise of white Châteauneuf
• Racy and ageworthy, Rioja’s white wines deserve attention

Finally, my wife and I have actually contemplated retiring to Sicily. However, her comment at the time, as we drove around the southern slopes of Mount Etna, was: “I am not living on a volcano”. Given recent events in the Atlantic, I can see her point — Etna is, after all, Europe’s most active volcano. Maybe Portugal would be a better bet?

Do biodynamic wines taste better than organic wines?

We have heard a lot about organic wine in recent years. This is made from grapes that have been grown using what is intended to be a more “natural” agricultural procedure, whereby both the grape-growing and the wine-making try to use ecologically sustainable processes. This apparently produces more artisanal wines, and which might thereby be more palate-pleasing, as well.

We may rightly ask: Do eco-friendly wines taste better? In answer, we have, indeed, been told that: Evidence mounts that eco-friendly wine tastes better. It is thus argued that this is Why certified organic wines are worth the search. Indeed: “Organic wine-making is all about taking away the shadow and mystery from that translation of a vineyard into the glass ... [the wines] really show the place, down to almost the row” (Why organic Shiraz is a true taste of terroir).

Beyond organic wine, there is biodynamic wine. Biodynamics is intended to take the basis of organics to another level, apparently with the intention of moving closer to some sort of spiritual (metaphysical?) ideal of do-nothing farming and wine-making. Given their intended superiority, we could reasonably ask whether these wines actually taste better than do organic wines; but the literature answering this question is much less clear.

So, it seems worthwhile to look at some data, in which the same people have tasted both biodynamic wines and organic wines. In this regard, wine-quality scores from reputable online sites are of value, provided we can get enough such scores. The quality of the wine tasting procedure is important, of course; but when it comes to plotting a meaningful graph, quantity certainly helps, as well. The people at the James Suckling site have certainly been busy this year, with: 12,000 wines rated, 13,000 to go: The year to date; so we could look at their data as an example.*

Recently, they produced a report on: 12 months of organic ratings: Uncovering some of nature’s finest. This report covers 1,682 wines labeled as organic, with an average score of 92.1 points (and a median of 92). They have also produced a report on: Rating biodynamics: Finding the true soul of wine. This report covers 750 wines labeled as biodynamic, which is 45% of the organic sample size, with an average score of 93.5 points (and a median of 93).

The first graph below shows the data for the organic wines, with the quality scores horizontally, and vertically a count of the number of wines at each score. The second graph shows the data for the biodynamic wines.

As expected from the data summaries listed above (average and median), the scores for the biodynamic wines are shifted to the right in the graphs, compared to the organic wines. That is, in general, the biodynamic wines do get higher quality scores than the organic wines. Note that this conclusion is independent of whether the James Suckling site tends to give higher scores than do other wine commentators (as has sometimes been suggested), since we are comparing the scores within the same group of wine tasters.

It thus seems reasonable to anticipate that, at least at the moment, organic wines taste better (on average) than do conventional wines, and biodynamic wines taste better (on average) than do organic wines. The future looks better for both the environment and for our taste buds.

This is not to say that these attempts at ecologically sustainable agriculture are without problems. Most of these problems have to do with grape-grower responses to disease. The viticulturalists are not supposed to be spraying their vineyards with modern chemicals. As noted by Tony Ingle (Angove chief winemaker, in South Australia):

If you’re going to be doing it in a region that’s got a lot of disease pressure, then it starts getting really hard. You have to start spraying things a lot, which is why we do it in the McLaren Vale, where there is very low disease pressure ... With organic grape-growing, yes you’ve got to be a little bit more careful, you’ve got to walk through the vineyard a bit more often to see what’s happening, and you’ve got to react when you see things making a problem.

This has become increasingly obvious this year, with, for example, Downy mildew becoming widespread in Champagne and the areas north of there. We may therefore ask: After the storms — do organic rules need to be rethought? (“you have to expect the unexpected; and that makes commitment to organic farming very difficult”). After all, for natural wine, everything depends on Nature; and Nature has the last word.

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* Note: I do not have direct access to the JamesSuckling.com database. For my blog posts, I independently extract the data from the online web pages, just like any other reader. This hopefully avoids any potential conflicts of interest; however, access to these pages was kindly provided by James Suckling, for which I am grateful.

Tasting great wines?

A few weeks ago, Eric Asimov noted that: "Benchmark bottles were always a splurge. But an increasing concentration of wealth has put them out of reach for all but the richest connoisseurs" (How income inequality has erased your chance to drink the great wines).

The basic argument here is that The Great Wines of the World used to be at least within the reach of the likes of you and I, even if we chose not to reach out, and actually pay the money. That is, we had a choice: "middle-class wine lovers could still afford to experience ... drinking a truly great wine, not simply to enjoy it, but to understand what qualities made it exceptional in the eyes of history." These days, this choice is no longer the case, so that Millennials will not be able to experience fine wines the way their Baby Boomer parents are alleged to have done. (See my post on: The outrageous prices of modern high-quality wines)

Well, I grew up in Australia. In Australia, even the Baby Boomers found it difficult — we could get good Australian wines, but the stuff from elsewhere was financially out of bounds, even back in the early 1980s. I got thoroughly sick of hearing about them, especially from a bunch of wine writers who usually got to taste them for free. Since I never got to experience these things, my daughter (a Millennial) and I (a Boomer) have more in common than you thought.

Far more importantly, though, I feel that this is all beside the point. Indeed, it smacks of wine snobbery. Wealth has always been the arbiter as to what are The Great Wines of the World. Are these wines expensive because they are great, or great because they are expensive? Neither I nor the Millennials will ever find out.

Obviously, I have had a long time to think about this, and work out what to do about my wine education. I could move down-market (Can’t afford the finest wines from Burgundy and Bordeaux? Try these instead), but that somewhat defeats the purpose. So, I decided that a far more useful yardstick of wine quality is likely to be modern comparative tastings. There are plenty of them; and they often seem to involve wines that we could all afford. Why not get the experience of drinking some of them, and find out why they did so well in head-to-head competition?

The answer to that question is, of course, that many of these tastings are not as objective as we might like. Indeed, some of them are downright suspicious — you pay your entry fee and you get your award. So, we need to tread carefully. In this regard, it has been said that: "The International Wine Challenge [is] the world’s most influential and rigorously judged wine competition". So, we could do worse than start by having a look at the IWC winners.

Conveniently, the IWC has recently announced its 2020 best wines from around the world. The full list of results is on their website, but the top 30 wines have been reported around the media (eg. here and here).

What I have done for these wines is use Wine-Searcher (and some other sources, when that failed) to collate the average $US price per standard bottle, excluding sales tax. The results for 29 out of the 30 wines are shown in this graph (the Chinese wine proved to be elusive). Each dot represents the price of one wine.

These prices are not as bad as they might be, although the increase in price across the wines is exponential (as expected). Clearly, some of them are not much better priced than The Great Wines, but others are very affordable. Indeed, a bit of a splurge (up to $100) would get you almost all of them.

So, my suggestion is that the Millennials can approach their wine education this way, rather than by adopting the ways of their forefathers. There is nothing either remarkable or new about this suggestion, but it seems to need to be pointed out again. The Old Way is not always the best way.

The ultimate objective of wine education, as I see it, is well expressed by Tom Maresca (Some good everyday wines): "I long ago decided that life is too short to ever drink mediocre wine, so even though I could never afford those legendary, crème de la crème bottles that headline so many ads, I’ve worked hard to ensure that the wines that accompany my daily bread are pleasurable".

The modern ranking of Bordeaux left-bank wines

A few weeks ago, I looked at what various modern commentators have written about how modern Bordeaux wines compare to the official 1855 Bordeaux Classification of the Médoc châteaux (Making modern sense of the 1855 Bordeaux classification). In that post, I looked only at the five groupings of the châteaux — Premier Crus Classés through to Cinquièmes Crus Classés (First to Fifth Growths),

However, classifications are artificial, because they usually have arbitrary boundaries between the groups. In this case, wine quality varies continuously, and the best wines in one group are therefore not all that different from the worst wines in the next higher group. As I noted in the previous post, no-one wants to be the top château in class 3 instead of the bottom château in class 2.

This issue can easily be circumvented for the Médoc wines, because the original assessment, by the Bordeaux Brokers’ Association, actually ranked the top Haut-Médoc châteaux (as well as putting them into groups). This ranking was intended to be based on quality, as determined by the long-term prices achieved by the various wines.

Obviously, this process can be repeated in the modern world; and so it comes as no surprise that various people have done so. I will be looking at their results here.

Modern ranking schemes

I have compiled the data from a number of modern rankings. These are attempts to rank the châteaux anew, in their modern context, without direct reference to the ranking of 1855. However, it is worth noting that this procedure is somewhat confounded by the fact that the current prices are influenced by the 1855 ranking in the first place.

In all cases, these rankings are derived from a calculated score of some sort.

1. Gary M. Thompson and Stephen A. Mutkoski (2011) Reconsidering the 1855 Bordeaux classification of the Médoc and Graves using wine ratings from 1970-2005. Journal of Wine Economics 6: 15-36. The list was based on the quality scores from three expert wine ratings (Wine Advocate, Wine Spectator, International Wine Cellar). The châteaux ranking was then derived from a regression analysis incorporating a number of relevant factors.
2. Albert Di Vittorio and Victor Ginsburgh (1996) Pricing red wines of Médoc vintages from 1949 to 1989 at Christie's auctions. Journal de la Société Statistique de Paris 137: 19-49. Based on auction sales prices from 1980–1992. The châteaux ranking was derived from a regression analysis incorporating a number of relevant factors.
3. (a) Orley Ashenfelter (1988) A new and objective ranking of the chateaux of Bordeaux (based on auction prices, of course!). Liquid Assets 5: 1–9. (b) Orley Ashenfelter (1997) A new objective ranking of the chateaux of Bordeaux. Liquid Assets 13: 1-6. These two lists were based on average auction sale prices from 1985–1988 and 1994–1996, respectively. I averaged the two listed scores for each château.
4. The Liv-ex Fine Wine 100 Index tracks the trading-exchange prices of 100 top wines (95% of which are from Bordeaux). Rankings of the Bordeaux châteaux, based on average prices over the previous 2-5 years, were produced in 2009, 2011, 2013, 2015, and 2017. I have taken the average of these list prices. Sadly, the 2017 list has only 48 châteaux, not 60, with only five 5th growths listed — the text says “5eme – £250 to £312” but the list has nothing < £274.

This provides us with nine separate rankings of the wines, based on:

1. auction prices 1980–1992 2. auction prices 1985–1988 3. auction prices 1994–1996 4. wine-exchange prices 2003–2007 5. wine-exchange prices 2005–2009

6. wine-exchange prices 2007–2011 7. wine-exchange prices 2009–2013 8. wine-exchange prices 2016–2017 9. wine-quality ratings 1970–2005

Obviously some of these price periods overlap, which will give extra weight to data from the duplicated years. Also, the ninth ranking is based on expertly assessed quality, which is only loosely related to price. Nevertheless, combining these rankings still seems like a worthwhile exercise; and so this is what I will do below.

Another issue is: exactly which châteaux were included in each ranking. For my purposes here, the number varies from 58–68, out of a total list of 70 châteaux. The differences stem from the slightly different purposes of the authors, and what data were available to them. There were 61 châteaux from the original 1855 list (it started at 58, in 1855, but some estates have been sub-divided and others combined), plus nine extra châteaux that make it into the rankings of various of the researchers, based on the modern quality of the wines.

Comparing the rankings

So, when comparing these nine modern rankings, the number of times each château has been ranked varies. Two-thirds of the châteaux (46 / 70) appear in all of the rankings, and 65 / 70 appear in more than half of the rankings, but some château appear only rarely (eg. the small estate Château Desmirail appears only twice, even though it was included in 1855).

In order to address these inequalities, each ranking scheme was converted to a proportion from 0 to 1, before being compared to the other rankings. The ranking schemes can then be compared most easily using the standard Correlation coefficient.

First, the correlations among repeat rankings by the same people are all >80%, and actually go up to 97% (Liv-ex 2013 versus Liv-ex 2015). So, at least we can say that the researchers are consistent through time — once they get a ranking they pretty much stick to it!

Second, in most cases the correlations between people are much lower, in the range 50–70%. This is still quite high, as a half to two-thirds of the variation in rankings is shared between the researchers. The cause of the variation that is not shared is not discernible in any detail, other than to say that the different sources of prices clearly have some effect.

The main exceptions to this point are the correlations between the ranking of Di Vittorio & Ginsburgh and the two rankings by Ashenfelter, which are 91-93%. These are based on auction prices covering the years 1980 to 1996, and so it is perhaps no surprise that they produce very similar rankings of the châteaux. Oddly, though, the correlation between the rankings of Ashenfelter 1988 and 1997 is only 83%, indicating that there are numerous small changes in the rankings over the decade separating the two.

Of these modern rankings, we might expect that the Ashenfelter and Di Vittorio & Ginsburgh rankings would most closely match the procedure allegedly used by the Bordeaux Brokers’ Association to produce the 1855 ranking. However, this does not mean that they closely match that ranking. Indeed, the correlations of the modern rankings with the 1855 ranking are mostly 30–40% (actual range 29–47%). That is, only about one-third of the variation in today's rankings matches the situation in 1855 — there is much more difference than there is similarity.

The modern ranking

So, what might a new ranking look like? Given that there is more similarity than difference among the modern rankings, we could simply combine them, by calculating the average rank for each château across the nine rankings. I have included the final list at the bottom of this post.

We can get a feel for this combined ranking by using a simple stripe plot, as show next. Each vertical stripe represents one of the 70 châteaux, with the average-rank scores increasing from left (best) to right (last).

Based on what we see here, we could, if we wanted, group the châteaux, although it would not be into five classes, as was done in 1855. Three main groups would be practical, although the second and third of these could then be further sub-divided.

There would be 13 châteaux in the top class, with no distinction between First Growth and Second Growth, as there was in 1855 (five First and 14 Second). This seems to accord with modern opinion, that the best of the Seconds are not less than the Firsts.

There are also three châteaux at the bottom of the ranking that probably should not be included in the list, as being consistently inferior these days: Château Cos Labory, Château Belgrave, and Château Lynch-Moussas.

Finally, we can visually compare this modern ranking with that of 1855. The dots at the left represent the châteaux ranks in 1855 (from bottom to top), and these are connected by lines to their position in the 2019 ranking. The gaps in the 2019 ranking represent those châteaux that were not ranked in 1855, while the groups of 2–3 dots in the 1855 ranking represent those properties that have since been sub-divided.

Note that at the top of the list (the bottom of the figure) there have been only local changes in the ordering. However, elsewhere there have been wholesale changes in rank order. As noted above, there is much more difference than there is similarity in the two lists.

Of course, who knows what will happen next, if global climate change has the expected effects on the wine industry. Check with your local wine blogger in 10 years’ time.

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Ranking of the Médoc châteaux
based on the average ranks from the nine modern rankings

Château Latour
Château Lafite-Rothschild
Château Mouton Rothschild
Château Margaux
Château Haut-Brion
Château La Mission-Haut-Brion
Château Palmer
Château Léoville-Las Cases
Château Cos d'Estournel
Château Ducru-Beaucaillou
Château Pichon Longueville Comtesse de Lalande
Château Montrose
Château Lynch-Bages
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Château Pichon Longueville Baron
Château Pape-Clément
Château Léoville-Barton
Château Beychevelle
Château Léoville-Poyferré
Château Haut-Bailly
Château Calon-Ségur
Château Gruaud-Larose
Château Grand-Puy-Lacoste
Château Pontet-Canet
Château Rauzan-Ségla
Château La Lagune
Domaine de Chevalier
Château Lascombes
Château Branaire-Ducru
Château Smith-Haut-Lafite
Château Duhart-Milon-Rothschild
Château Giscours
Château Saint-Pierre
Château Talbot
Château Malescot St. Exupéry
Château Brane-Cantenac
Château Langoa-Barton
Château Chasse-Spleen [doubtful position due to few data]
Château Clerc-Milon
Château d'Issan
Château Cantenac-Brown
Château d'Armailhac [aka Mouton Baronne Philippe]
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Château Lagrange
Château Cantemerle
Château Haut-Batailley
Château Boyd-Cantenac
Château Prieuré-Lichine
Château Batailley
Château Gloria
Château Kirwan
Château Rauzan-Gassies
Château Haut-Marbuzet
Château Durfort-Vivens
Château Ferrière
Château Malartic-Lagravière
Château Grand-Puy-Ducasse
Château Haut-Bages-Libéral
Château Marquis de Terme
Château Lafon-Rochet
Château Pédesclaux
Château Marquis d'Alesme Becker
Château Pouget
Château du Tertre
Château Croizet Bages
Château La Tour-Carnet
Château Desmirail [doubtful position due to few data]
Château Dauzac
Château de Camensac
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Château Cos Labory
Château Belgrave
Château Lynch-Moussas

How similar is the wine quality of the Bordeaux First Growth chateaux?

We are always being told about the Premier Cru (First Growth) wines of Bordeaux, as though they are the pinnacle of red wine-making. Now, I have had only a few of these wines, but I have realized that they are not really to my taste; so their outrageous prices do not concern me, personally.

Nevertheless, I have sometimes wondered about the quality relationships between these wines. Which chateaux get high scores in the same years, and which ones do not? This seems like precisely the sort of question that I try to answer in this blog.

This is actually straightforward, because I have already used suitable data in some previous posts (How large is between-critic variation in quality scores? ; Wine-quality scores for premium wines are not consistent through time ; The sources of wine quality-score variation).

The data consist of wine-quality scores for the five premier cru Bordeaux chateaux (Latour, Lafite-Rothschild, Margaux, Mouton-Rothschild, and Haut-Brion) for each of the vintages 1988–2014, inclusive. This makes a total of 195 wines. The scores come from: Jeff Leve, Robert Parker, Jean-Marc Quarin, Jancis Robinson, La Revue du Vin de France, and the Wine Spectator.

There are thus three sources of possible variation in the set of quality scores:

1. between the 5 chateaux
2. between the 6 commentators
3. between the 27 vintages.

The first one is the one I am studying, which means that I need to decide how to address the other two, so that the chateaux comparisons are correctly made. One simple way to address the third source is to average the scores across the years, for each commentator. This leads to two data analyses: one based on the original data, and one based on the averaged data — their difference will tell us how much vintage variation affects the relationships.

As I have done in previous posts, I have used a network to visualize these data, with the network being used as a form of exploratory data analysis. I first calculated the similarity of the different wines, based on the quality scores, using the correlation coefficient. I converted this to a distance measurement; and then used a neighbor-net analysis to display the between-chateaux similarities as two phylogenetic networks.

For the interpretation of such networks, see the post on Summarizing multi-dimensional wine data as graphs, Part 2: networks.

The first network, based on all of the scores for each vintage and each commentator, is rather uninformative. This means that the between-vintage variation is fairly large, and is thereby obscuring the topic of interest (the relationships among the chateaux). However, there is some indication of similarity in quality scores between Latour and Lafite, and between Mouton and Haut Brion.

So, we need to investigate these patterns further, by reducing the effect of between-vintage variation. As noted, this can be done by averaging the scores across the vintages, before producing the network. The result is shown in the next graph.

Things are now much clearer. Indeed, the quality scores for Latour and Lafite are very similar to each other, as are the scores for Mouton and Haut Brion. Margaux is placed in an intermediate position between the latter two.

So what do we conclude from this? First, we can note that there actually are patterns in the data, rather the whole thing being random — certain chateaux do follow each other in terms of variation in wine quality (at least as assessed by the 6 score sources included here).

Second, we might not be surprised that the Margaux wine is different from the others, since it is geographically separate from the others, in the Margaux commune of the Haut Médoc. Similarly, we might not be surprised that the the Lafite Rothschild and Latour wines are similar, since they are both located in the Pauillac commune of the Haut Médoc (although one is in the north of the commune and the other is in the south).

However, our third point might be that Mouton Rothschild is also located in this same commune of Pauillac, and yet its wine quality is most similar to that of the Haut Brion wine, which comes from the Pessac area of Graves. Indeed, these two chateaux are almost the furthest apart of the 5, geographically, while the closest chateau to Mouton is actually Lafite. You might like to think of an explanation of this pattern for yourself.

This obviously leads on to an assessment of the 1855 classification of Bordeaux wines, which I will tackle in a future post.

How many 100-point scores do critics really give?

There has been much talk about the apparently inexorable increase in the values of wine-quality scores over the past few decades. The scores from 1983 (when Robert Parker introduced his 100-point scale) to the year 2000 averaged much less than have the scores from 2000 to 2018. Indeed, Jamie Goode noted two years ago: "The 100-point scale is very compressed at the top end …. and this scale is becoming so bunched at the top end that it is nearing the end of its useful life."

This leads to the obvious question about just how crowded the top end might be, irrespective of whether we use 100 points or 20 points, or something else.

Before looking at the actual data, though, it is important to note that there are two possible interpretations of a maximum-point score: (i) the wine is as good as we expect to meet in our lifetime; or (ii) it is the best that could ever be. If we mean the latter, then we run the risk of claiming that we are the arbiters of perfection. As Ambrose Bierce defined it:

PERFECTION, n. An imaginary state of quality distinguished from the actual by an element known as excellence; an attribute of the critic.

So, it may be best to claim that we mean option (i), not option (ii). Under these circumstances, of course, when we do subsequently do encounter a better wine then we would need to assign a score in excess of 100 points (see Why not expand the 100-point scale?).

Some data

One suitable place to look for data about how often wine commentators use maximum scores is the Wine-Searcher database. Here, we are provided with hundreds of thousands of wine-quality scores from 30 critic sources, or so (some of which represent groups of people). For most of the critics we can, at the click of a button or two, get a list of their 500 top scores. This allows us to compile the data reported here (mostly compiled at the beginning of this year).

The only tricky data to compile come from Robert Parker himself, or more generally his publication the Wine Advocate, as the scores actually come from a number of people. The issue is that there are more than 500 100-point scores in the database. For example, Lisa Perrotti-Brown recently noted just how many 100-point scores the Advocate has for the 2016 Napa wines, alone. So, I would like to thank the people at Wine-Searcher (especially Robert Anding) for looking up some of the numbers for me.

The data that I compiled cover 23 critics who use the 100-point scale and 6 critics who use the 20-point scale. In each case, I calculated the percentage of their scores that are the maximum; and for the 100-point scale also how many were near-maximum (99 and 98 points).

The first graph shows the 29 critics, ranked in order of how many of their scored wines received maximum points. Not unexpectedly, Robert Parker and the Wine Advocate team are the principal culprits, although Jeff Leve (at the Wine Cellar Insider) is trying very hard. However, quite a range of the other commentators have non-negligible numbers of top scores. Indeed, only 9 of the critics (one-third) have no maximum-point wines in the database. Interestingly, this includes 3 of the 4 critics from Australia (Jeremy Oliver, Huon Hooke, and the three-headed Wine Front).

This leads me to wonder whether some of these people are giving high scores but without being willing to produce the attention-getting maximum scores. I examined this by looking at the percentage of scores covering the 98-100 points range for those 23 critics using the 100-point scale. (This does not really work for the 20-point scales, since the data collection would involve half-points, which Wine-Searcher does not record.)

These data are shown in the second graph, with the critics still listed in the same order as above. This shows that everyone uses near-top scores, and that some people use them a lot. In particular, Luca Gardini has no 100-point scores but quite a few at 98 and 99 points. Furthermore, Tim Atkin and Daniele Cernilli (at Doctor Wine) clearly use an over-abundance of 98 and 99 points, compared to 100 points.

If we exclude the Parker/Advocate scores, then 0.3% of the scores in the database have maximum points (ie. 3 out of every 1000 wines); and 0.8% of the scores are in the range 98-100 points. These numbers may be lower than many people are expecting. This seems to be mainly because 34% of the Wine-Searcher scores actually come from the Wine Spectator magazine (or 32% if we include all of the database scores), and its contributors produce relatively few scores in the 98-100 range (0.07%). The Wine Enthusiast is the next-biggest contributor (17% of the scores), and even it has only 0.16% of its scores in the 98-100 range.

Finally, it is instructive to look at the four Australian critics plus the lone New Zealander. James Halliday has long been singled out in Australia for handing out a lot of high scores (eg. What's in a number? Part the second), and the data show that he does indeed use 100 points more than do any of his compatriots. However, the 98-100-point data show a very different picture. Jeremy Oliver is the only one with fewer 98-100-point wines than Halliday; and Huon Hooke and Bob Campbell exceed Halliday to the tune of 3.0 and 3.6 times as many wines! Apparently, only Oliver has not yet succumbed to the lure of the high-level scores.

Are words better than numbers for describing wine quality?

Last week, I wrote about using numbers to describe wine quality (The fundamental problem with wine scores). The advantage of expressing quality this way is that numbers conveniently have a simple linear order from minus infinity to plus infinity, so that they give the impression of being unambiguous. The disadvantage is that, in order to have a number mean anything worthwhile, it has to combine all of the various components of quality together, in which case its interpretation is actually ends up being quite ambiguous. Much of this discussion was recently summarized in: The demise in popularity of critical wine score pronouncements.

The only alternative we have is to use words. After all, we can use a whole set of words, describing each of the various quality components, so that we don't really need to combine multiple dimensions into a single word. As Kevin Brogle has noted: "I value the description more than the score. The score only tells you how much they liked it, not how much you will like it." So, this post is for Phllip White, who has always preferred words to numbers, and wine to either of them. Get well, mate.

Words versus numbers

Before we start, it is important to note that to the general wine-drinking population, words can apparently be just as effective as numbers. For example, consider this 2017 survey of purchase influences in the USA, from Wine Opinions. It suggests that a positive written wine review does just as well as 90+ score, in terms of influencing a purchase.

On the other hand, it is clear that the actual descriptions themselves are often not helpful. As an example, consider the poll conducted by One Poll for Lathwaites Wine 2013 survey: 66% of wine drinkers find wine descriptions UN-helpful in choosing wine. The people surveyed considered some words to be useful (eg. fresh, zesty, peachy) and some other words to not be (eg. brooding, haunting, tongue spanking).

There is a lesson here, I think, which is that words have serious limitations.

Some limitations of words

We regularly see blog posts from around the world noting that there are several different limitations to words when they are applied to wine (eg. Have we reached the end of wine criticism?). These include:

• wine descriptions are not uniform, so we cannot compare them;
• wine descriptions are too imprecise to help us evaluate wines;
• wine descriptions are too flowery or pompous to be of practical value.

The last point may be a matter of taste, just like wine. For example, the above-mentioned Philip White has engendered this comment from Kim Brebach: "Philip White writes about wine in a way no one else ever has." This may very well be a good thing, which you can check out for yourself at his blog Drinkster.

However, the first two points can be addressed in a more objective manner. After all, we can still be quantitative about wine descriptions, even without numbers. For example, here is the Wine & Spirit Education Trust's recommended word "formula" for describing a wine.

Not unexpectedly, most wine commentators go far beyond this. Indeed, they would probably have very few readers if they didn't show a bit more literary flair. And therein lies the basic issue of lack of uniformity and precision in wine descriptions.

Much of the information on this topic is summarized in the 2009 book by Adrienne Lehrer, Wine and Conversation, 2nd edition. The book discusses the large set of English words used for wine description (usually adjectives, and frequently metaphorical), and whether they each mean the same thing for different people. The author concludes that there is very little consensus about the meanings of wine words, although enologists are better able to agree on descriptions of wines than are lay people. However, most people are not able to describe the wines they have tasted so that other people could reliably match those descriptions to the actual wines.

Uniformity and precision

Steve Lay has noted: "Straw, tobacco, black cherries, currants, blackberries, crisp apples, floral, etc. These are just a few of the standard aroma definitions and some taste profiles of a wine; for which we can all agree." This is true, although the vocabulary actually goes way beyond these few words. Indeed, Lehrer's book starts with a list of 238 words "found in the wine literature". Therein lies the communication problem: how could we ever be either uniform or precise with so many words?

As a simple exercise, I have compared the 5-word descriptions from Journey Through Wine: an Atlas (Adrien Grant Smith Bianchi & Jules Gaubert-Turpin. 2017) and Wine Folly: the Essential Guide to Wine (Madeline Puckette & Justin Hammack. 2015). For each of the wines from 40 different grape varieties, I looked for words in common between the two books, interpreting this very loosely. The resulting counts are:

Words in common 0 1 2 3 4 5

Number  of wines 6 17 11 3 3 0

So, most of the descriptions (70%) had only 1-2 words in common out of 5, and some had no words in common at all, which is pretty much what I was expecting. Even at this basic level, the words are neither uniform nor precise.

Solutions?

Sadly, I have no solutions, myself. Instead, I will present a couple of suggestions from other people.

Let's start with Oliver Styles: Wine writing's lack of judgment, who is apparently tired of repetitive tasting notes, and wants firm opinions rather than lists of adjectives:

while this ability to find and use new expressions for having a smell and a taste of something hints at a future on the Mills & Boon roster, we rarely get more understanding of whether the critic getting creative with language likes the wine or not. Basically, that's left to the number.

That is, instead of relying on florid word descriptions plus a number, we should actually write about whether we like the wine or not. Sounds simple, doesn't it? I doubt that it is, though.

Another alternative is to treat the data as multi-dimensional, just as I did last week for wine-quality scores. The bottom line is this: it still takes multiple words to describe all aspects of a wine's quality, and summarizing this in a word or two does not change anything. As I said for the situation of using numbers, we are still summarizing multiple dimensions (expressed as words, this time) into one dimension (a small set of words).

I pointed out last time that, under these circumstances, we actually need to draw graphs, in this case graphs of the word collection, rather than numbers. This idea has long been applied to wine descriptions, for example the early works by Louise S. Wu, R.E. Bargmann & John J. Powers (1977. Factor analysis applied to wine descriptors. Journal of Food Science 42: 944-952) and H. Heymann & A.C. Noble (1989. Comparison of canonical variate and principal component analyses of wine descriptive analysis data. Journal of Food Science 54: 1355-1358).

It is difficult seeing the wine-buying public going for this solution. However, I have shown one example picture below the line, along with a discussion, for anyone who might be interested.

Conclusion

It has been suggested that a wine-quality score is actually a word not a number (A wine rating is an adjective, not a calculation). If it is, then perhaps we should use actual adjectives, rather than supplying mathematical substitutes. Unfortunately, adjectives do not really seem to be up to the job of expressing quality, at least not in a uniform or precise manner. In which case, literary wine descriptions will continue to hold sway, with or without an attached score.

To quote Rusty Gaffney:

Some astute wine consumers look closely at the descriptors in a wine review and find it of paramount importance relative to the score. The description of the wine seems of greater usefulness, especially if the reader can see “between the lines”, and understands certain words or phrases that the writer uses that are a tip-off indicating a special wine. Wine descriptions would seem to be of most value to well-informed wine consumers, while others less knowledgeable about wine look more to scores for guidance.

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Below is an ordination diagram, as an example of summarizing multi-dimensional wine information. It is taken from:

Alice Vilela, Bebiana Monteiro, Elisete Correia (2015) Sensory profile of port wines: categorical principal component analysis, an approach for sensory data treatment. Ciência Técnica Vitivinícola 30:1-8.

In this work, a panel of tasters evaluated each of each 28 port wines for a set of 23 characteristics. The characteristics could each be described by a word, representing colors, aromas, flavors, mouthfeel, balance and persistence.

Each of the 28 labeled points in the diagram represents one of the wines, labeled as either a White Port (BW), a Ruby Port (BR) or a Tawny Port (BT). The proximity of the points to each other represents how similar they were in wine style, based on their descriptions (by the evaluators). Note that the wines do cluster by type, with all of the whites grouped at the bottom-left, the rubies at the bottom-right, and the tawnies at the top of the diagram.

The 23 words represent the descriptions that were evaluated for each of the wines. The location of each word (or set of words) on the diagram tells us which wines they were associated with. For example, the description "Dried fruits" was associated mainly with Tawny Ports, whereas "Red fruits" was associated with Ruby Ports, and "Honey" was associated with White Ports. On the other hand, the descriptions "Woody" and "Golden" were associated equally with Tawny Ports and White Ports, but not with Ruby Ports; and "Red fruit flavor" was associated with Tawny Ports and Ruby Ports but not White Ports.

The diagram thus shows us a single picture of how all of the word descriptions related to all of the different wines.

Estimates of cork taint from the Wine Spectator Napa office

The Wine Spectator magazine's Napa office tracked the number of apparently cork-tainted bottles in their tastings of California wines from 2005 to 2016, reporting their results at the beginning of the next year. There has been no report on the situation in 2017; and James Laube, who wrote the reports, has recently retired from regularly doing the California tastings (Wine Spectator announces changes in California wine reviewers). So, this could be an appropriate time to review their data.

Each year, all of the bottles tasted in the Napa office were assessed for "off" aromas. For bottles with corks, taint is usually caused by the presence of the chemical trichloroanisole (TCA) in the cork, but there are other potential sources of off smells. For example, the Cork Quality Council also lists 1-octen-3-ol, 1-octen-3-one, and guiacol.

Whatever the source, the data in the following graph refers to the "off" wines as a percentage only of those bottles with corks. Obviously, the data show that the percentage of tainted wines has improved through time.

Indeed, the trend looks impressively like cork quality is steadily improving. However, as I mentioned in a previous post (Drawing lines through a graph of points — what does this mean?), fitting a trend line to a graph can be a deceptive business. For example, the dashed pink lines in this next version of the graph highlight a different pattern — that tainted wines decreased between 2009 and 2010, but have otherwise remained relatively steady before and after then. Maybe something happened at that time?

Either way, the cork industry is usually reported to have a much lower estimate of cork failure than is shown in the graph above, typically 1-2 percent. This estimate was clearly not believable 10 years ago, and it is still half of that reported by the Wine Spectator, even now.

The cork manufacturers (mainly in Portugal) have been reported to be getting their act together, to improve the situation (eg. Taint misbehavin’: improving TCA testing methods to ensure cork quality). Improved testing may explain the apparent improvement between 2009 and 2010. The basic issue seems to be getting the cork wood clean, so that it can be turned into wine stoppers. Indeed, the industry is claiming that they will have eradicated TCA by the year 2020.

This raises the point as to why we use corks for wine bottles in the first place. Vidon Vineyard has this to say on the matter:

The main reason corks remain the predominant closure is tradition; change doesn’t come about easily in many fields. As long as one is willing to accept an occasional bad bottle of wine, corks are fine.

In any case, it seems clear that consumers often associate corks with high-quality wines (The effects of wine bottle closure type on perceived wine quality).

Vidon Vineyard's comments raise another important point:

A problem is that much of the time a cork-tainted wine isn’t recognized as such, but is passed off as “just not a good wine”, which means it’s the winemaker’s fault. And oftentimes a slightly tainted wine is consumed as “not too bad”, while if it could be tasted alongside an untainted wine with the same label, the reaction may have been “wow, this is great”!

Given that most wines are drunk within a few months of being released, the idea that we need corks in these particular wines seems to be ludicrous. Apart from anything else, untwisting a screw cap is so much easier!

On the other hand, we might also be concerned about the fate of the Cork Oaks (Quercus suber) themselves. These trees are owned and managed by farmers, who need to make a living from their land. If they can no longer make money from their cork trees, then those trees will be under threat of being replaced by some other crop. According to the Cork Quality Council, 37% of the cork forests are in Portugal (and 27% in Spain), where 50% of the cork production is centered (with 31% in Spain) — so, this is where the effect will be felt. In 2015, wine corks represented 72% of the Portugese cork industry's value, worth €644 million. This is not an inconsiderable industry, which will exert pressure to keep the Oaks.