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The Wine Collector
Practical wine collecting advice from Steve Bachmann, Vinfolio's CEO
 
19
Mar
2008
The use (and abuse) of wine ratings by retailers
Categories: Buying wine , Retailing

Wine ratings can be a contentious subject and I've already done my own rant on them last year (see How to use wine ratings successfully).  But I wanted to expand further on the last part of that post addressing how retailers use professional ratings.  Here are a few approaches a retailer could use:

  1. Show highest ratings selectively - The selective representation of ratings is the norm for retailers.  The goal here is to promote the highest possible ratings but only when above a threshold to encourage buying.  The quality of the source is less important than the number. The actual commentary on the wine may or may not be provided.  A corollary to this approach is that wines with ratings below the threshold are displayed without their low ratings (the theory being that bad ratings are worse than none).
  2. Display professional comments without the ratings - The philosophy here is that the descriptions help sell the wine but the ratings might turn people off so hide them from the buyer.
  3. Show all ratings, good and bad - This method provides transparency (at least for an identified set of sources). It recognizes that many wine collectors will independently check ratings using their own paid subscriptions to reviewers' sites if none are provided or a rating is missing.  Moreover, as ratings are only one input into a purchase decision, I could easily argue that a poor rating on a wine from a favorite producer creates buying opportunities as price likely reflects less buyer demand.

Deception?

Let's face it.  Methods 1 and 2 are less than totally honest ways of dealing with customers.

Transparency builds trust 

As far as I know, Vinfolio is the only wine retailer who voluntarily offers up all ratings, good or bad, for a reasonably complete set of professional sources.  This transparency enables our customers to make informed purchase decisions without spending extra time looking up reviews and breeds trust in our brand. 

To be fair, taking this approach is easier for us than most retailers because we pay to license all review content from major reviewers such as Stephen Tanzer, Allen Meadows, Roy Hersh, and Richard Juhlin (see today's press release on the addition of Juhlin and our content partners page).  This content is deployed both in our free VinCellar online cellar management software and within our online store.  So whenever we are selling a wine reviewed by one of these parties, the most recent rating from each source is automatically displayed (without censorship!).  See example below:

In addition to our current licensed content partners, Vinfolio also manually adds Robert Parker and Wine Spectator scores wherever possible (and yes, we would be glad to license their content too if we could persuade them to do so).  But the lack of an automated way of mapping their reviews to the wines we are selling means we will always have "holes" for these valuable sources. Finally, Vinfolio also tries to provide its own ratings and reviews whenever there are none from professional sources (or to supplement them).

Bottom line: Which approach to retailers' use of ratings would you prefer as a buyer of wine?  What would you do if you were a retailer and why?
6 comments:

Steve,

Excellent post on ratings and the abuse thereof. Kudos for including all ratings -- you are right, transparency is key to gaining your customers' trust. I am aware of at least one other retailer who provides all ratings, good or bad -- the Chicago Wine Company -- and I have always respected them for this.

There are just too many retailers who show only the high ratings, or worse yet, excerpt the tasting notes with ellipses ("The 1999 Château de Chat-Eau is... ...a very good wine."). This seems a profound disrespect for their customers. Do they want the customers to be happy, or just to move some wine? If the former, they're serving neither the customer, nor themselves, nor the industry well in the long term.

Ditto with emails whose subject line runs something like: "High-scoring Aussie gems for only $25," the implication of which is that we as customers are buying points and not wines. Again, if we are sending the subliminal message that wines should be valued for their points, what will we, the industry, do with the majority of the wines in the world, wines that don't have over-90 scores, or more likely, no scores at all? Many of these are lovely, many are wines that our customers (and we ourselves) would be happier to drink than some high-scoring wines.

Showing a diversity of ratings does more than just gain customer trust. By showing that even the so-called "experts" differ considerably on any given wine, the consumer starts to get the picture that there is no objective right and wrong, and hopefully begins to trust his/her own palate and judgments more. Slowly perhaps we, as an industry, can break down the idea that everything is about points, or at least about one person's palate, and favor the diversity of styles that is necessary for the long-term health of the industry.

I hope that an increasing number of retailers will take the high road, as you have.

Posted by Doug Cook at Wednesday March 26, 2008

Steve

I do commend Vinfolio for attempting to offer up all ratings, however, I am not sure that it does in fact do so on a consistent basis. Let me give you an example of an omitted rating:

2001 BV - Georges de Latour Private Reserve
This wine includes a WA rating of 88 points, but omits the WS rating of 69 points

Regards

Posted by Anonymous at Friday March 28, 2008

Thanks for pointing it out. We've now added it. If anyone else spots any missing reviews, just email service@vinfolio.com and they'll be added. As I mentioned at the end of the post, we don't have an automated way of adding Wine Spectator and Wine Advocate reviews since neither currently licenses their reviews so we'll end up missing some.

Posted by Steve Bachmann at Friday March 28, 2008

One more thing, I went ahead and requested that our data team go back and verify every item in our inventory without a WS or WA review to make sure we have captured all of them. Note that if there are more than one, we will only add the most recent one.

Posted by Steve Bachmann at Friday March 28, 2008

Just reread my posting and realized that when I wrote "if the former," I meant to write "if the latter," though no doubt careful readers will have already figured that out!

At any rate, your posting has got me thinking about a question raised over dinner a couple of years ago among a group of industry friends. What if there were an association of retailers, and perhaps press as well, who all agreed to a common code of ethics regarding the use of ratings and reviews? There are a very small number of retailers who in effect do this, and are justifiably proud of it. They should get wider visibility for their leadership. The consortium would presumably create a brand of its own, usable by those companies who agree to abide by the code of ethics, and market the group as a whole. Done properly, the members would get the wider visibility they deserve, generate wider discussion of this important topic, and hopefully nudge the industry towards meaningful change.

Perhaps a utopian idea best left as a dinner discussion (I'm given to those sometimes). But were such a consortium to exist, Vinfolio seems ideally placed to spearhead the effort.

Doug Cook
Able Grape

Posted by Doug Cook at Friday March 28, 2008

Doug, as I am on the board of the Specialty Wine Retailers Association, I can and will bring it up with that group.

Posted by Steve Bachmann at Friday March 28, 2008






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