Wine Spectator (1-year auto-renewal)

Wine Spectator is the most prominent and widely available wine criticism magazine and as such it has been endlessly pilloried. Well, they deserve it one recent issue's cover story was "Danny DeVito and Rhea Pearlman, Hollywood Power Couple!" How ridiculous can you get? The pages are littered with articles devoted to wealthy Californians and their extensive cellars; one recently spent an entire article on a rich man who helps his rich friends by cataloguing their cellars on, gasp, a spreadsheet! Yeah, it's like that.

Wine Spectator has also been criticized for the way it uses hyperbole to the extent that no one believes them when they're right anymore. Oenophiles now wait for Robert Parker (Wine Advocate) to back them up before believing it. "Best Vintage since 1961" and "Vintage of the Century" and "Vintage of the Decade" are far too common copy, coming once a year or so.

The vintner profiles hold some interest, but don't fool yourself, you read this magazine for the scoring. Wine Spectator has the resources to taste more wines than any other English language publication (that I know of) and despite some strange results, are generally good at evaluating the bottles in question. As I've noted elsewhere, in spite of the hyperbolic headlines, the Spectator is stingier than Robert Parker for rating wines "Outstanding." The caveat is that a lot of wines get bunched up in the 84-86 point range, although I suppose that matches my experience.

By comparison to the Wine Advocate, I find Wine Spectator scores much more inconsistent. This makes sense because the Spectator has a larger staff and it's difficult to establish a common benchmark across all of the offices and tasting panels. In their favor, they do review a fair number of lower priced wines, more than their aforementioned colleague, and their reactions are more or less in the ballpark as to where I'd put them if I were doing the reviews. But know when using the Spectator to allow some give on either side, a confidence interval, if you will.

It might be terrible that a magazine wastes its first three quarters of every issue on mindless fodder for social climbers. It might be tasteless that they spend so much time promoting the notion that wine is an investment, instead of an immensely enjoyable consumable commodity. But those of us with big brains and modest credit ratings know that there is much to be salvaged from the back of each issue. We also know that Parker is the first point of reference.

There's certainly a lot to hate about Wine Spectator and, for that matter, Wine Advocate. Many winemakers decry the existence of both magazines, and usually lay the blame entirely at Robert Parker's doorstep for making the 100-point rating system an industry standard.

Wine Spectator's scores have gotten better with time, as have their articles. They've shied away from California "glitz" and have looked more into food. Also, the education classes that they list on their website are becoming increasingly more helpful.

Apparently they listened to much of the criticism and worked toward creating a more respected magazine. I think they've done well.

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The Wine Spectator is one of those magazines designed to reassure you that you're rich or that you soon could be, all in the context of a shared love for the fruit of the vine.

There's lots of deadly serious material in this glossy, pleasing publication. But if you're a lover of wine who is *not* rich the category includes this reviewer you need to learn to take it with a sense of humor. Just enjoy the game.

That game includes a travelogue of the world's wine regions as well as the possibility of gaining a decent education via month-by-month reading in viticulture and wine appreciation itself. This reader is in it for the long haul I hope to enjoy good wine at an affordable cost for the duration of this earthly slog and the Wine Spectator is my companion along the way.

My job takes me out for many dinners in various parts of the world that include wine-splendored places like France, South Africa, Chile, Argentina, Australia, New Zealand and of course Northern California. But with wineries now in 49 of the USA's fifty states, what's *not* a wine region these days?

On those business treks, I find myself out for dinner as often as not. It's personally satisfying to know just enough to order a Pinotage in Capetown, since only South Africa produces this varietal, or to opt for one of Argentina's persuasive Malbecs because they're just *that* good. We're not talking wine snobbery here, just satisfaction at the margins of life's all too margin-less journeys.

If this sounds like your game, the Wine Spectator may be a worthwhile investment. Even if not, consider splitting a subscription with a colleague. That's what I do. At half the price, I get a fine magazine and avoid burdening my bookshelves with one more heavy, beautiful, pleasant magazine. Life can deal you worse.

Read Best Reviews of Wine Spectator (1-year auto-renewal) Here

The fact is that Wine Spectator is about the most inconsistant, beholden to special interest, pseudo-wine magazine ever! Their reviews are indeed gushing...I challange anyone to find a single negative comment. They say tastings are blind and comments are registered before the bottles are revealed so I would like to know how they consistantly come up with bottle-specific comments like, "this is a good Grange, but not quite up to the standards of previous vintages." ...Tasting is also done by panal highlighting another weakness: Usually, you can learn the palate and preferences of a particular reviewer, compare them to your own, and weight that person's ratings accordingly...here you have no idea which so-called 'experts' have reviewed a particular wine, so this tool is lost. Additionally, none of the WS reciewers, to my knowledge, posesses either a 'Master of Wines' or a 'Master Sommielier' certification. While extremely difficult to earn (Robert Parker has failed the MoW test twice), either should be a prerequisite for a professed expert (or at least one of them). For real wine enthusiasts, subscribe to decanter; for the more casual drinker, food&wine presents a much better value.

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I subscribed to WS for a couple years in the late 90s, and loved the magazine. It keeps a balance between reviews of wines both new (which is the main emphasis) and older vintages, and background stories on vintners and so on. The writers are almost all very good (and I'm a professional writer myself) -only one of them do I dislike and he doesn't review the wines. Both the wine connoisseur and the novice can profit from reading this publication. I only dropped the subscription because I moved and the collection, no issue of which I wished to discard, was occupying more and more space on my bookshelves.

Now I subscribe to the online edition so I can check ratings before I buy a wine. The WS, in addition to Parker and other reviewers, perform an essential service for critical consumers who can't otherwise judge whether a bottle is worth the price asked. And we need WS and Parker and all to tell us when the best reds are ready to drink -some really great ones are not mature for more than a decade. I drank the highly rated Chateau Canon 1982, for which I'd paid over $100, 17 years after harvest, and my group could tell it wasn't ready -still closed down. Sure enough, if I had read Spectator carefully, I'd have picked another bottle for that occasion because they said it wasn't yet mature.

Robert Parker has the reputation for being more influential for high-end wines, but Wine Spectator's scores are generally pretty close to his. And they review a broader spectrum, as noted by other commentators below. WS will often steer you to excellent buys for under $15, or even under $10. If you get only one of these per month, or steers you away from a very overpriced bottle, the subscription (about $50) pays for itself.

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