Fred Dame

“So, what is the score for this wine?” asked by one of my customer after I extensively explained to him about the particular wine that he had in his hand. It didn't really matter to him who made the wine, what was the story behind it, or even how it would paired up with the dinner that he had planned tonight. None of that mattered to him other than the score that had been given to this wine by one of the leading wine critics. If that's the case, why should I bothered to learned about wine day and night? I could just stick one of the shelf talker and be done with it. Fortunately I managed to be polite that day and refrained myself from quoting Fred Dame (2016) and told the customer “Which demi-god you follow?”. Fred Dame, for those of you who never heard of him, is one of the first American Master Sommelier; so

First bracket consisting on the number of expert that they will observe; limiting themselves on 5 well known expert from three different country. Second bracket is concerning the type of wine that they will based the scoring upon. They specifically choose 62 of the Bordeaux wine from 2003 to 2011vintage. The rationality behind this is because Bordeaux wines have high technical standard in wine making (suppressing flawed wine variable) and strict AOC code of viticulture and vinification with three very distinct teroir. Coupled that with fairly similar climactic condition in each of its area; Bordeaux have much more measurable variable than other region like Burgundy with their patchwork of teroir. Cardebat et al.,(2016) used 1885 Bordeaux classification as a baseline for comparing against the expert rating, basically to act as a control for the data they received about the expert rating. If the experts have unbiased judgment, they expected the rating to mirror the 1885 classification (which in itself based on bias, but more about that later