Decanter.com Bordeaux Bottle Ratings

[dross]

Most years I use initial barrel ratings from multiple sources to purchase Bordeaux futures. Subsequently I review bottle ratings when they become available to round out my purchases for a given vintage. Starting with he 2010 vintage year I added Decanter to the list of sources I use. They provide comprehensive rating coverage, using their 20 pt scale, by AOC for en primeur. However, I find no evidence either on-line or in the magazine issues, to which I subscribe, that they go back and provide comprehensive coverage of the bottled wines.

I do see that they annually conduct ratings of finished wines for their World Wine Awards (WWA), including some of the Bordeaux they previously reviewed in barrel, but in doing so they use Gold-Silver-Bronze medallions rather than points.

Does anyone know if they ever follow-up with a comprehensive review of bottled wines using the same point system as their en primeur ratings? If so, can you tell me when they are likely to publish the 2010 results and how I can find them on their web site? I can't seem to find bottle point ratings even if I search one wine at a time - what comes up regardless of the vintage year I'm searching for appears to be the original en primeur points and reviews.

Thanks

[DavidG]

Not consistently that I know of. I never found Decanter reviews useful or consistent. Mostly because they were committee ratings with individual writer's tasting notes, and the individuals and those writing the TNs were never the same, so I couldn't figure out when to trust them. It's been years since I've looked at Decanter, so maybe they've changed their methodology?

[dross]

I fairly new to Decanter but what you summarized has been my experience to date. They seem to do a good and comprehensive job on Bordeaux barrel ratings with the same single raters consistently handling Left bank, Right Bank and white wines. But then for follow-up bottle ratings they seem to be all over the map with panels of differing people, which sometimes average the raters scores, sometimes list each panel members scores seperately, and sometimes awarding medallions rather than points as with the barrel ratings. Occasionally I've found an article covering a portion of bottle scores with ratings but not comprehensively as with their en primeur ratings.

Thanks for your input. I thought I'd better check with folks having more experienced with Decanter than me in case I'm just missing something in the way they conduct business.

Thanks