By Tony Rego

August 17, 2006 6:46 PM | Link to this

The official grape of Ohio should be Riesling.

By Jane Scott

August 16, 2006 11:15 AM | Link to this

I’m a former winery owner and I would vote for Pink Catawba as the historic wine, Nicholas Longsworth and the famous poem on Pink Catawba, etc. For the current “state� wine, I’d pick Vidal Blanc. It’s unique to the eastern U.S., grows extremely well here, can be made into a wide array of products from bone dry, to demi-sec to ice wine. Nearly everyone has a version of it and consumers love it! Jane (formerly Wyandotte Winery and Wm. Graystone Winery)

By wine-o

August 16, 2006 8:23 AM | Link to this

Ahhh yes…The snarkiness factor. Only a trained wine professional can judge when the anticipated maturity of Mark’s snarkiness will be. Is it the annoying cat-like pet on Thundercats? Is it one of those a-sexual creatures that live under the sea? Or can it not be defined? Is it (dramatic pause) just the Snark?

By cathy

August 16, 2006 12:34 AM | Link to this

Uncorked rating? Hey, as long as Mark continues being acidic and snarky; as long as MJ and JB keep posting their hilarious commentary; as long as Paul, Niki, Kim, Todd, Peg, Bob, Dennis, Greg, wine-o, Barb, and all the others keep posting their educated insightful comments; and as long as the blog continues to be fun bantering with no outright mean-spirited bashing… well, jeez, I got nuttin’ to complain about. I give it a 96. (Always room for more good-natured snarkiness…)

By Ann Boucher

August 16, 2006 12:18 AM | Link to this

I give Uncorked a 95.

By Mark

August 15, 2006 8:11 PM | Link to this

Winegeeks dude: I have just the right amount of acidity to age quite well, thankyouverymuch …. Mark

By winegeeks.com

August 15, 2006 6:18 PM | Link to this

This is something that we as a website have struggled with as of late. It seems that wine ratings are in danger of becoming completely useless. The Spectator inflates their ratings in accordance to how much advertising $$ is spent with the company (or at least that is what several winemakers say), and they only use about 8% of the 100-pt scale. Are all wines really within 8% of each other? Everyone has a 100 pt scale now [including sites that sell wine, stores, even small wine websites :)] thus taking some of the air out of that 95 pt rating. But as mentioned in the article when a magazine does not have a numerical rating their sales slump severely. We are contemplating scrapping the scoring system all together for one that is similar to Paul’s suggestion (good, v. good, etc) even though our site rates a 6.0 as a “good” wine and a 9.5 as damn near unnatainable, a lofty goal reserved only for the very best wines on earth, not a $12 Argentine malbec (no offense, Mendoza). Still, where will our readership go if we eliminate this? If anyone has any thoughts I would like to hear them. BTW- I give Uncorked a preliminary score of 90-93pts. Enjoyable now, but I would like to see how Mark ages for the next 20 years before passing my final judgement.

By Marty Lou

August 15, 2006 5:02 PM | Link to this

As an educator, it’s my experience that the greater the point spread of the scale, the greater the tendency to inflate ratings, so that the average and the poor fall higher than they should. A 50-point scale would be probably reflect more accuracy. I think Uncorked is just fine—and I’m glad the there are no “nasty, four-letter-word filled, personal attack responses”. Yikes! Too much vitriol makes wine—and people’s hearts—go bad!

By Paul

August 15, 2006 2:18 PM | Link to this

I’ll echo Kim’s comments for the most part. Too many wines have sacrificed their terroir/region/varietal character and appeal in search of mass appeal. I’ve mentioned the California styled Bordeaux in previous posts. Kim’s Barolo comments highlight a similar problem. For inexpensive wines, the loss is sad, but probably economically justifiable. For expensive wines, I doubt if the trend is actually economically justifiable. Those who seek mass appeal wines usually don’t want to pay high prices, and those willing to pay high prices usually expect something special — not something with mass appeal. Historically, tasting a wine before buying was the best assurance of buying what you like — albeit complicated by buyer’s maturing tastes over time. However, as wines become more homogeneous, I suppose tasting before buying will become less important. Eventually, a three point scale might work: 3=very good; 2=good; 1=poor. By then, we probably will have eliminated all the horrible wines, but we likely will have eliminated all the excellent and great wines, too! As far as rating Uncorked, don’t we first need to define what we are rating, and what we are rating it against? For example, are we comparing against print media? All Blogs? Other wine blogs? Other DDN blogs? Do we consider relevance? Interest? Accuracy? Number of responses? Grammar? Spelling? Civility of responses? (And, of course, is a blog with civil responses better or worse than one with nasty, four-letter-word filled, personal attack responses?) Now, without answering any of those questions, I’d say, like different vintages of the same wine, it varies from article to article — perhaps some get 75, quite a few 85s, occasionally a 95 (probably looks pretty much like a bell curve). And in the interest of fairness, I should point out that I only using a 30 point scale — from 67.5 to 97.5 — when rating blogs! :-)

By Kim Kocher

August 15, 2006 12:25 PM | Link to this

I have mixed feelings about the 100 point scale. It has served to help countless newbies negotiate the world of wine choices. Some of them actually became serious students of wine. The lost 50 [unused] doesn’t bother me. When I was in school there were people who scored below 50 on tests. They didn’t make it far and wines that score below 50 get culled from the herd at an even faster rate. My biggest problem with the 100 point scale is what it [and to be fair, all ratings] has done to some of the great wines of the world. Sure the increased knowability has brought the bottom up but , in some cases, it has dumbed the top down. When’s the last time you had a barolo that tasted like Barolo ? It sure hasn’t happened with me since the 1990 vintage. The influx of international style wines designed to score high in the rating wars has completely changed that regions’s wines. Is that good ? Not if you want your Barolo to matter because it tastes of place. Climatological changes may have the same effect down the road anyway , I guess, but an award-winning, international-style nebbiolo has less value to me than a true Barolo. I’m probably the exception here as I’ll wait the 15 years for the magic to happen. In my opinion there is much less magic to be found in the new versions. I wish everybody could taste each wine prior to the purchase decision. Until that happens ratings will be useful and do both good and bad things for the world of wine. Kim