Show All » Geek Notes Section » Geek Notes
Saturday, August 27, 2011Portland Monthly's flawed Oregon Best 50 Wines
Apparently Portland Monthly thinks Oregon Wine exists only in the Willamette Valley
Here’s the link to the Article on Portland Monthly: Oregon’s 50 Best Wines.
Okay worst list ever, if we are doing a comparison tasting where is the list of 400 wines and how where they chose. This really is my prime concern with this tasting, who got to come to the table and who was excluded. Things OWG would do with a full disclosure of the data:
1.Question:Statistically how many were from each AVA and Sub region?
The article says 19 Varietals from 15 Appellations and 103 Producers.
OWG would see how many were from where, who and what were excluded.
2.What’s the price ranges and vintage spreads.?
The Article says 4 years worth of vintages
OWG wants to know if we are comparing apples to oxcarts, $100 2008 Pinot versus $20 2007 ?
3.Where’s the list of producers and how many wines from a producer were allowed?
The Article says 103 producers
A little quick math tells me that each producer got to enter about 3.88 wines, but they said over 400 so it was more than likely 4.
Who got tasted and how where they selected, again the most basic question as to bias.
This is fairly typical of a biased tasting. No chance for independence here if you are not open with your selection process and data. So a closer look at the numbers says that if you are one of the lucky 103 producers picked to be tasted the chances are 1 of your 4 wines entered has what chance of getting in the top 50 ? At least 1 in 4 even better if you entered all whites to get on the whites list.
How does this 103 producers compare to Oregon?
There are over 400 producers in the Willamette Valley and about 100+ more in the rest of Oregon. So for this tasting to be even reflective of Oregon Wine we would need to have a least 250 producers represented with about 25 to 30 of those producers being from non-Willamette Valley producers.
Now you see the real contest here is not how good the wine is but can you get it tasted in the event. Be assured the producers who were in the event make wonderful Pinot, in fact some of my favorite vintners were there, but a lot more were missing. Let’s be open with data that a wine tasting produces, not all competitions should produce winners for 50% of the entrants. That said I have no problem with the results but with the title “Oregon’s 50 Best Wines” is a load of fertilizer for the vines. An accurate title would be " The Best 50 of the 100 Producers we Tasted" or "Portland Monthly's 50 Favorite Oregon Wines", but Oregon's Best really ?.
Posted By: Ted Weldon @ 9:42:54 AM
