The New Way To Rate Wines: A Scoring System For Everyone

Christopher Calicott, the site director for LasVegasCritics.com – and a fellow Las Vegas Critic – believes that the current “100 point” system for rating wine is broken.

This is nothing new, there’s a New York Times article by Gary Rivlin from several years ago that urges people to drop the old system an adopt a new one…because the wine-rating system is not improving with age. (Unfortunately, the scale that they recommend is extremely limited and it wouldn’t really be a viable alternative to the one that is currently in use.)

The wine-rating system leaves some with a sour taste and one writer openly expresses their hate for the 100-point system. Even a simple and elegant explanation of the 100-point scale points out one of the inherent flaws in the system with the comparison to grade school in the opening paragraph. TheWineBuyer.com points out that the 100-point scales used by Wine Advocate / Robert Parker, Wine Spectator, Steve Tanzer, Wine and Spirits, Connoisseurs’ Guide and Wine Enthusiast are not the same and they have a lengthy explanation page for everyone’s different scoring systems.

[edit 12/26/09: Here's another blog post explaining the differences in wine rating scores with a link to a comprehensive comparison of the different systems that was compiled by De Long Wine.]

More recently, DrVino.com acknowledges that the wine system is badly flawed with a link to the Wall Street Journal article, “A Hint of Hype, A Taste of Illusion” by Leonard Mlodinow, the author of The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives. In the article, Joshua Greene, the editor and publisher of Wine and Spirits, says, “Even though ratings of individual wines are meaningless, people think they are useful.”

Wine ratings should be useful and we definitely need to adopt a new system.

Luckily for everyone, LasVegasCritics.com can help: they’ve developed a new and meaningful Wine Rating Scale.

want to know about some awesome music?

I’ve got some more posts from the past to share with you on that critics site.

The best stuff that I encountered from last year is on my top 10 of 2008 list.

I’ve also encountered a lot of good stuff from this year:

Two of the best EPs that I found were Exquisite Corpse from Warpaint and Wake the Earth from the Honey Trees.

A couple full-length albums that I liked were (a)spera from Mirah and Replace Why With Funny from Dear Reader.

what I was watching on TV last year

Here are some links to some of the things I’ve written about several different television shows from last year. You can read about how Fringe wants to be the new X-Files or the five best TV shows that we’ll never get to see. I also posted my first thoughts on Privileged, revisited Beverly Hills with the new 90210 and expressed my doubts about where Terminator: the Sarah Connor Chronicles is headed. Also, Elizabeth compares True Blood to the Sookie Stackhouse books. There’s more, but I’ll share that later.

Fall (might) Be Kind (to) Animal Collective

…but I definitely won’t be.

I don’t get why people like Animal Collective so much because I really don’t. And their new EP doesn’t change my opinion about them at all. My Merriweather Post Pavilion review from the beginning of the year explains a bit more about my first encounter with the band. Don’t worry though, if you like Animal Collective we can still be friends…as long as you promise to never play them when I’m around.

James Bond, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and you

Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer is close to $4 billion dollars in debt and they will soon be looking for a buyer. The studio owns – among other things – the rights to the James Bond franchise, but this situation doesn’t seem to be affecting the momentum of the next film in the series. Apparently, the 23rd Bond film is already in pre-production and will start filming in the latter half of 2010. We can expect it to come out sometime in 2011 if everything goes according to plan. If you can’t wait until 2011, here is a short review for Casino Royale and my thoughts about Quantum of Solace from the end of last year. Also, if you’re really impatient and you happen to have several billion dollars lying around I’m sure you could buy MGM and get things moving a little faster.

Should You Comment On That Facebook Status Update?

Not sure if you should leave a comment on someone’s Facebook Status?
Here’s a chart that may help you out:

Should You Comment On This Facebook Status Update? (via AlanaTaylor.com)

Acoustic Metric EP Unplugged

5 new acoustic tracks from Metric:

stream the songs (and videos) for free.

another change in direction

Okay, so I decided against using this site to update my life. Maybe somebody noticed, but I doubt it.

The new (and improved!) plan is to start sharing links to the reviews that I’ve been posting on a totally different site…a totally different site with reviews about everything, from the new items at your local convenience store to the expensive wines served in upscale restaurants…located in exotic countries. The Las Vegas Critics site is one of the reasons that this particular blog has stagnated, but Secret Undersea City will soon host links to all of the reviews I’ve been writing during the time I’ve been gone. Get ready.

Remember Jean-Claude Van Damme?

You do? Well…do you remember liking any of his movies? Because I don’t. And I never thought I would say this, but:

I want to see the next Jean-Claude Van Damme movie.

JCVD (click for trailer)

(a quick update because I haven’t completely given up on this blog…even though I have tons of other web-related stuff going on at the moment.)

Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog

The widget wasn’t working out for me, so here’s a direct link to the site:

Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog

Starring: Neil Patrick Harris as Dr. Horrible, Nathan Fillion as Captain Hammer, Felicia Day as Penny
Screenplay By: Joss Whedon, Maurissa Tancharoen, Jed Whedon, and Zack Whedon
Directed By: Joss Whedon
Produced By: David Burns, Michael Boretz, and Joss Whedon
Plot Outline: The story of a low-rent super-villain, the hero who keeps beating him up, and the cute girl from the laundromat he’s too shy to talk to.

Music by: Joss Whedon and Jed Whedon
Lyrics by: Joss Whedon, Jed Whedon, and Maurissa Tancharoen
Score and Orchestration by: Jed Whedon