"The Matrix is everywhere…. It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth." Morpheus, The Matrix

Wine scores used to mean something. 98 points from Robert Parker made a winery famous and their wines impossible to acquire. Now, with no leading critic, no single voice, every wine that isn’t outright flawed gets 88 points or better.

Wine media hasn’t abandoned real wine criticism, it has just coded it, crafted it more cleverly. Think demographics, micro-influencers, Somm speak, manufacturing sensory ecosystems through carefully chosen keywords and categories. The noise is the score — 95 points — but the signal is ‘blood sausage’, ‘fernet’, ‘black-rock minerality’.

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