Rantaholics

I have to give credit where credit is due. You Gary Vaynerchuk just might be the face of the wine revolution I’ve been looking for. You have the knowledge, you have the palate, you have the attitude and most importantly, you have the passion. A lot of shit in life you can teach, but passion just isn’t one of them. I’m beginning to like you already.

There’s a couple of things that have me invariably uneasy about enrolling in your cause however. Let’s start with this whole 100 point rating scale for wines you seem quite enamored by. Ok. So I’m cool with the scale. It’s familiar and the concept is easily understood by the masses. I happily suggest that anyone who doesn’t understand a 100 point rating system should probably not be drinking wines to begin with. But in a rating system with 100 points, how come the same ratings come up over and over and over again? There’s a 100 point spread between 0 and 100 yet so little of it is utilized. I don’t agree that on a 100 point scale an “extremely solid wine” should score a 90, while a “poor effort” and “I’ll have to give this wine a pass” still scores in the 80’s. With one hundred incremental units I’m not really sure why roughly 93% of your online ratings score within the same 13 percentile point band (80 - 93). Are you selectively picking the bottles to suite that band or is something else going on? Don’t want to let the other wine critics down (the same wine critics you bring up over and over and over again)? I don’t get it. Seriously. We don’t give a shit about the other critics. We’re looking to you to lead this revolution, not them.

So take a deep breath. Why the 100 point scale if only 13 scores get used roughly 93% of the time?

Out of 690 wines that you currently have rated, only 23 wines scored below an 80, or 3% of your total wines currently reviewed.
Out of the same 690 wines rated, only 30 wines scored higher than a 93, or 4% of your total wines currently reviewed.

That leaves us with a figure of 93% of the wine you review scoring within the same 13 point band.

Overall I like you. I like your fresh take on tastings, there’s no pretense, no pomp, none of that old snob shit. I like your level of involvement in the wine community, you’ve got some really solid knowledge and what appears to be an extremely well-rounded palate. You bring solid passion to the table obviously, and you have a much better wine show then I do, since I don’t even have one. But in the end I don’t know. You claim to bring the thunder but I suspect that’s only partly true. When you drop your sack on the table and give a truly shitty wine the 20 points that it deserves while every other wine critic is slagging 85 points, then maybe, just maybe, the real wine revolution has begun.