If you score wines..read on!!!

[Steven Pritchard]

The main issue for me with Cellar Tracker is not the scoring, which does as noted above does have a herd mentality. I have a far greater issue with people that have little experience of wines that are meant for cellaring. The number times I have seen wines described as too old, where upon checking a bottle it is actually in a closed/dumb phase is quite significant. I have wasted quite a few decent wines this way, until I decided to ignore the comments and trust my own instincts.

And the reverse is also true (wines not meant for ageing are "cellared"). Just inexperience, or stylistic preferences.

 

[Alex Lake]

CellarTracker should have a weighted scoring system where points awarded by other users and critics you trust ("like"?) are given more weighting. Also a bit of networking, so that friends of friends scores are given a modest extra weighting too. One might even add a feature to mark someone has "ignore this person's score" (and apply that to the cascading weighting system too). Mind you, that would exacerbate the "herd mentality" I guess....

Maybe it already does this!

 

[Gareth Germain]

It’s interesting- back when I gave scores - an 82 was jolly decent and included many wines I’d buy again, and 88 was where things got interesting. I mostly stopped because I found it difficult to separate my feelings about the person who’d brought the wine (how could Scott’s wine be anything less than 93) and the person. Somehow I can write prose notes which help me accurately recall the wine without feeling quite so influenced by the person behind the wine.

With that said - I am very grateful to those who continue to use points.

I must go back through my notes Leon to see what score you gave me

 

[Andrew Stevenson]

The main issue for me with Cellar Tracker is not the scoring, which does as noted above does have a herd mentality. I have a far greater issue with people that have little experience of wines that are meant for cellaring. The number times I have seen wines described as too old, where upon checking a bottle it is actually in a closed/dumb phase is quite significant. I have wasted quite a few decent wines this way, until I decided to ignore the comments and trust my own instincts.

Yes, that is common. As with any online crowd-sourced opinion, it does require an element of caution when it comes to others' opinions. I don't think Eric publishes the algorithms he uses for calculating overall scores (I wonder if he includes scores below 50 in calculating averages?), but I think it would be useful to see a bit more information on the overall scores, e.g. "users in California on average rate this 96; users in the UK on average rate this 86; your "friends" rate this on average 88."

On the upside, at least we can be pretty sure that users of Cellatracker are far more wine-literate than the people who leave 1 star ratings on other sites because it's red, and they only drink whites, or because they were ill afterwards, or because they didn't like the label etc.

This guy

logos's User Profile

Marks 60’s very good, 70s excellent and 80s great.
However…, I can’t really see the point of doing that on CellarTracker where the common scoring criteria seems to be between 85 and 98 as it just messes things up and verges on attention seeking.
Not that I can’t see the guys point in a wider context of scoring i.e. it’s more similar to scoring in other realms.

He obviously has a point, though I'd argue that it makes distinguishing between 40 and 41, 85 and 86 etc ridiculously pedantic, and it would actually be more worthwhile to have a narrower scale (like e.g. HRH Jancis). In my head (and previously in writing) that's what I do/did, but for Cellartracker it must, in my view, be translated to the parkerian 50-100 point scale. else there's no point in publishing your scores there, and you should just put them in the text of a TN.

 

[Alex Lake]

Lots of fun to be had with the data, for sure!