Friday 20 April 2012

Dear Neil I


Your suggestion that the Top 100 panel is weak reveals just how your judgment is lacking. How you can call yourself an independent wine writer is laughable. You use your employer’s platform in highly personal attacks where you also support the interests of your friends and their clients.

Your attacks on WOSA are rabid. You are a gossip columnist masquerading as a wine writer whose first audience is search engine optimisation. Like the Parlotone’s Giant Mistake, you should release a wine called Giant Hypocrite. Your death throes are increasingly grotesque while you bring SA wine writing into disrepute - you should leave that to me.

7 comments:

  1. Try as I might, I cannot find anything about Pendock and the Top100 on the net. Can you supply a link?

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    1. they appeared as comments on Paul Cluver's facebook page re which competition you value in an exchange with Christian Eedes (subsequently removed)
      Jonathan

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  2. I would love to do a test on the wines entered. 1 in 4 wines make the cut... From a judging perspective, heck how difficult can that be. No scoring involved, no arguing over a point here or a point there. Or even a gold vs a silver. So why all these high qualified international judges? I am willing to bet that blind my tasting group could select 80% of those wines. If there was over a 1000 wines entered then you need a pretty good tasting panel o spot the 1 in 10 gems. But 1 in 4...throwing darts would be just as accurate.

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    1. ja while no wine competiton is a perfect science, maybe top 50 until more entries - i think tho there is space for a competition handled / branded ('top ...') in this way.

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  3. dionysus
    it's actually quite difficult to sort out 100 from 400 - trust me - no one bothers to enter cheap ropey wines into this sort of competition, because it is simply make the cut or nothing. Throwing darts wouldn't be just as accurate. I promise you.

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  4. Jamie

    When somebody says: "Trust me" I get nervous...problem is I don't trust you. I challenge you to prove me wrong. By throwing darts I would have a 1 in 4 chance of choosing the same wines...pretty high odds. With a bit of application, a sniff and a swirl I would get 50% of these wines. And if I tasted the wines I would sure pick 75%. It not rocket science. Have a statistician work it out. BUT if it was 1000 wines to choose a Top 100 from...I am afraid I would be out of my depth and will leave it up to the pros.

    One thing you must remember, we not talking about scoring wines we talking about a simple YES or NO.

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    1. Dionysus, when you have selected 100 from 400 wines in real life, please comne back and comment again

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