Talk:Château Montrose

The Midway Mudrats is an outstanding sports team and the best in its league. Organized in 1960, it became state champion in 1982, 1984, and 1989. Use of innovative strategies has given it nation-wide fame.

Since 1998, the team has won three games.

The Midway Mudrats are generally considered to be the leading team in the state. Sports announcer Russ Barnett says the team’s use of creative plays and resulting success "is to be emulated by other teams." Columnist Sara Holt writes "the Mudrats are an inspiration to young athletes." Sports historian Dr. Albert Hines says it all when it observes that "the Mudrats are the greatest in history!"

(NOTE: Someone has decided that neither the names of the team’s opponents nor its scores from 1998-present can be reported and argues that providing that “unnecessary” information would be biased and POV. He also deletes similar important information from Chateau Montrose)

Hello Vinifera. First of all, I've never heard of the midway mudrats. I do understand the point you try to make with the analogy though. Unfortunately wine IS NOT a game, nor is an estate a sports team. This is why your analogy fails. I'm not attempting to censor the results of the wine tastings you continually cite, I've left the links for these competitions on each relevant chateau page. My personal feeling is that, outside of the Paris tasting of 1976 (due to the effect it had for California wines), none of these "competitons" is really that significant. I can dig up notes from large tastings I've participated in that would show the California wines get trounced by Bordeaux in blind tastings with my regular group. That's beside the point though. Wine is not a sporting event, and it shouldn't be presented as such in Wikipedia. Judging wine, both blind and non-blind is not a science and the results shouldn't be taken as such. Wine tasting is subjective in ways that science and sports are not. Should we also list the scores from Robert Parker and the Wine Spectator for every vintage of these wines? Wanna bet which wines have higher average scores, the Canadian and Chilean wines or the Bordeaux?

BTW, I've enjoyed many wines from California (that's where I'm from), and I've visited the Okanagan (they do make some very good wines, even their reds are decent), and I drink Chilean wines quite often (with good results). Also, it's pretty clear based on what you've posted that you have something against either Bordeaux wines in general or wines that you deem are "too expensive". That's part of what constitutes your "bias"

In summary. I'm not trying to hide the results here, I just think that they're not significant enough to list on the pages of each chateau. Leave the link, if a reader is interested in that kind of thing they can go read about the competiton. Otherwise the page should focus on the history of the estate, the vineyards and vinification methods, and an overview abouth the style of the wine. - Mikecase00

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Hello Mike- The wine competitions I cite are very important because they rank all results ordinally from top to bottom and don’t permit multiple winners. Other competitions are organized to generate numerous awards to a large proportion of wines for marketing purposes and, therefore, lack credibility or significance. Unfortunately, my brief explanation of why the rigorous competitions I cite are so important are repeatedly censored.

You’re quite correct that a winery is not a sports team. It’s actually a business and reporting on a business’ products, standing in its industry, management team, successes and failures, and much more is appropriate for an encyclopedia article. A brief paragraph from Wikipedia’s article of GM should suffice to make the important point:

"GM, to date, has been the world's leading auto manufacturer for 74 years consecutively. On December 21, 2005 Toyota Motor Corp. announced that it would produce 9.06 million vehicles for 2006. Analysts estimate that GM will only produce around 8.825 million cars for 2006, giving up the title of the world's largest auto maker. However, CEO Rick Wagoner is confident that GM will remain #1. Regardless, GM's status as both an automotive and corporate juggernaut is in jeopardy. Its financial difficulties have dragged stock value down (see below); as of March 23, 2006, GM's market capitalization is roughly $12.5 billion."

I’ve not questioned your motives or integrity nor will I do so and I’ve been compromising in good faith, even in the absence of reciprocity. Cheers, Vinifera

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Hello Vinifera,

I think the root of our disagreement is based around the significance of the tastings you site. You seem to think that these are all "unique and highly significant" events. I'd argue, especially for the Bordeaux estates involved, that these events are neither unique nor significant (outside of the Paris 1976 tasting). First of all, the fact that these events rank-order their results and do not permit ties is hardly unique. There are lots of tastings that take place every year, both formally and informally that do exactly the same thing. I agree that the results tend to be more meaningful than what you would find in the results at the LA County Fair's wine competition for example (a case where numerous awards are handed out and there's lots of ties), but that's beside the point. Given enough time we could post thousands of these events conducted in the very format you claim is highly significant and unique to the Wikipedia articles. I myself have participated in several tastings conducted in a similar format. Should I be posting the results from my own tastings to the articles and claiming they're "Highly significant and unique" because we tasted the wines blind and ranked them? I've always viewed these events as rather like parlor games. They're fun, but they sort of miss the point of what wine is all about.

Second, I reject the premise that these are all significant. I'm quite aware of the effect the Paris 1976 tasting (and it's follow-ups in 86) have had on the wine world, but I've never even heard of many of these tastings you cite. Did the Berlin 2004, or the 2005 Saint Catharine's event even get coverage in Wine Spectator, or Wine Enthusiast, or Decanter, or another significant trade magazine? I'm sure perhaps in some minor journal with smallish circulation covered these, but I'm speaking specifically of one of the major wine magazines. Where do we draw the line between a significant event and one that's not important enough to merit an article and inclusion on pages of the participants? The 1976 Paris tasting merits inclusion, perhaps the follow-ups in 86, but beyond that I think it's starting to push the relevance limit.

Also, in many of these articles in which you claim the results are "highly significant", you provide no discussion or insight as to why these are significant at all, just a listing of the results. That's not enough to count as significant in my opinion. If these tastings are so important, why is there not a listing of the notable wine dignitaries who participated and scored the wines? Why is there no mention of what basis the wines were judged? Was future potential taken into account, or merely how they preformed at the moment of tasting? Why is there no discussion of the impact the event has had on the wine world? You merely present these articles as if the infallible and nameless judges proclaim that this set of wines is superior to that set of wines, as if results of tastings are ever so concrete. If these tastings aim to prove anything other than, on a particular day one wine showed better than another, there's a whole host of reasons why the results could be claimed as erroneous (selective bias is one example, demographic preferences for another).

Lastly, when one considers the articles you seem to contribute to, it would appear that your goal is merely to bash well-known French wines as being inferior to new-world wines. In fact, it's pretty obvious several chateau pages were created only to post links back to the results of these tastings. Why do you have such hostility for wines from France? MikeCase00

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This article was automatically assessed because at least one article was rated and this bot brought all the other ratings up to at least that level. BetacommandBot 02:51, 27 August 2007 (UTC)