In search of Average

[Julian D. A. Wiseman]

Well I'm at Crossroads now and pucking up both a TH83 in 375 and - risky business - a Tuke Holdsworth Porto Wine Reserve. That one is a 750 and may end up in bolognese later this evening.

DRT: the market is dangerously saturated. You might have to lower your RO83 price to 4¢ a bottle, and perhaps even to 3½¢.

[Janet Ainsworth]

Well I'm at Crossroads now and pucking up both a TH83 in 375 and - risky business - a Tuke Holdsworth Porto Wine Reserve. That one is a 750 and may end up in bolognese later this evening.

Yeah, that reserve ruby is kind of nasty--its signature note seems to be Robitussin. But it wouldn't hurt in a Bolognese, I bet. If you ever see the 10 year tawny, that's actually not bad. About on a par with the Quarles Harris 10 Year available at Trader Joes, and for a few bucks less.

[Glenn E.]

No 2008 Croft Quinta da Roeda at Crossroads. The TH83 was $16 and the TH Porto Wine Reserve was $13. Time to go try them now, and then make dinner!

[Glenn E.]

Hmm... not a good sign. The cork was spongey and obviously disintegrated. I had to push most of the rest of it into the bottle and then decant. Looks to me like these have been standing upright like I found them in the store for... years, probably.

TH83 cork

2014-02-23 16.14.10.jpg (158.56 KiB) Viewed 1429 times

[Miguel Simoes]

Looks to me like these have been standing upright like I found them in the store for... years, probably.

Doesn't get more average than that!

[Tom D.]

Looking back at my tasting notes over the years, I was surprised to see my worst ever score for a Port was 87 points

That's probably partly because I just don't drink a lot of Port, so when I do open a Port I try to make it something decent. And some of my lower scores have been for Ports that are generally acknowledged as good Ports, or I've tasted numerous times and know they are good Ports, but I still enter the low score if it shows poorly, as bottle variation is real and should be reflected in scoring, IMHO.

I have certainly had plenty of really bad bottles, but usually because they were plainly flawed in some way. Perhaps I'm too generous in considering a bottle flawed, when in fact it should just be called a BAD wine and scored accordingly, but that can be a hard call unless you know the wine well, or the flaw is very plain.

Anyway, thanks Glenn...the next time I do taste a truly BAD Port, I won't be upset, instead I'll probably happily think back to this thread and proudly proclaim I've tasted a really bad Port!

[Roy Hersh]

I enjoyed reading the first couple of posts here, but need to head out for a bit. I will be back with glass in hand tonight to read the rest of this thread!

[Tom Archer]

75-79 - average (edit: or "fair" to avoid confusion with a statistical average)

I'm intrigued as to why on the western side of the pond, the word Average has come to be seen as meaning something that is of the lowest quality. Neither the Oxford nor Merriam-Webster dictionaries list that interpretation.

Moreover, the word Fair in this context is defined as: 'sufficient but not ample' - so should be used as a description for the lower middle quality bracket, rather than the lowest.

If a word is needed to define wines that fail to qualify as Poor I would suggest using the word Inadequate

So if I were to put wines into six quality bands, I would use:

Excellent

Very good

Good

Fair

Poor

Inadequate

If you wanted to add a seventh, the word Average would be correctly placed between Good and Fair

[Julian D. A. Wiseman]

Not just them Americans.

I recall that, some thirty years ago, there was always an advert on the back of Private Eye, an advert for a company called something like Dateline. One completed the form — description of oneself and intended other — sent with cheque, and Dateline arranged the match.

How attractive are you?
□ Very attractive            □ Attractive            □ Average

The missing two answers riled me.

[Phil W]

So if I were to put wines into six quality bands, I would use:

Excellent

Very good

Good

Fair

Poor

Inadequate

If you wanted to add a seventh, the word Average would be correctly placed between Good and Fair

The middle rating would be the median, not the average. Average gets severely abused as a term; In this case "Average" also depends on how many bottles fell into each category (trivial example: If you opened 100 bottles, 90 were excellent and 10 were very good "average" would mean just above very good).

Interestingly, your list is almost exactly (hello Julian ) the set of ratings I use for port, except I substitute "ok" for "fair" and have a tendency to use a variety of less polite words for the category below poor.

[Tom Archer]

Average gets severely abused as a term

It is, by definition, a relatively broad church, as it can mean mode, median or mean.

However it is incorrect to use it to describe something that is very poor.

[Phil W]

It is, by definition, a relatively broad church, as it can mean mode, median or mean.

Really? I would have equated average and mean, but that mode and median were specifically different.

However it is incorrect to use it to describe something that is very poor.

Certainly misleading in normal use, though not necessarily incorrect: Consider a case of port with 1 good bottle, 2 poor [full of VA, say] and 9 oxidised and leaking; in that case the average bottle from the case could certainly be very poor. However, your statement would be true with the extra pre-requisite of a large sample size with a broadly even or gaussian distribution (as generally considered for colloquial use).

I think that the difficulty in establishing any categories on a scale (and this would be true, even ignoring the average issue) is that when we consider the set of what we drink, we are often pre-selecting on some basis (usually perceived/expected quality) and getting everyone to agree on the sample set can be tricky; are we considering all VP, or all port? If you have one person who only drinks well-stored VP, and one who only buys cheap rubies, both might be quite happy and consider their own average bottle to be good, yet one would consider the average bottle from the other person's drinking to be excellent and the other very poor.

To be fair to Glenn, he did touch on this in his original (edited) post, having replaced "average" with "fair" on his scale, which would remove the statistical question, but then conflated the issue by asking what we would consider an average port; If his final question had been "What would you consider to be a fair port today?" I think the reply chain would have been very different.

It is also important to note that, for me, the 100-pt scale is absolute. It's the range of all Port ever produced, and in some sense is "fixed" in quality level. In other words, a 90-pt Port today is exactly as good as a 90-pt Port was 40 years ago. Some other people adjust their scale with time so that "average" means "average right now" instead of "average over all time."

Given the above definition from the first post, if the scale is intended to cover ALL port, then assuming a linear scale (perhaps a large assumption), if only 1% of port produced is VP, I would expect it unlikely that any of us drink a representative-enough cross-section of 'port' to answer the "average" question, though many could set a 74pt value to a low-quality VP. Very, very tricky to agree a common scale...

[Glenn E.]

Note: I did not present the entire scale as I have no intention of ever tasting below-Fair Port. It is incorrect to assume that Fair is my lowest possible rating.

[Janet Ainsworth]

In some respects, the world of port is different from that of most other wine, or at least it ought to be in theory, because of the IVDP approval needed. Presumably if the port is of ghastly quality, it wouldn't get the selo from the IVDP. Or is that untrue? Is it just a question of typicity that they police rather than quality? I would assume that if something went catastrophically wrong in the wine-making process, that port would never see the light of day. (Assuming of course that the flawed wine was obviously so at the time of presentation to the IVDP and not flawed such that its deficiency would only become apparent over time.)

So, I'm assuming that if something passes IVDP muster, it must be at least marginally acceptable in quality and not flawed in any significant way. So is the quest for the 'average' or 'fair' or even 'lousy' port a quest for the lowest benchmark of an approved port? That might mean that wines that turn out flawed (due to TCA or contamination not perceptible in the IVDP process) or wines that become seriously undrinkable due to storage problems aren't in the running for average, under that definition.

[Tom Archer]

Phil wrote:

I would have equated average and mean, but that mode and median were specifically different

This, from the OED:

A number expressing the central or typical value in a set of data, in particular the mode, median, or (most commonly) the mean, which is calculated by dividing the sum of the values in the set by their number

Janet wrote:

Presumably if the port is of ghastly quality, it wouldn't get the selo from the IVDP. Or is that untrue?

The IVDP's track record in this regard is less than glorious. During port's 'dark ages' (1971-1993) some very poor ports were allowed to be sold as 'vintage'. Today they are fussier, but this also causes issues - their stereotypes for what 10/20/30/40yr tawnies should taste like annoys the hell out of people like Dirk Niepoort.

[Eric Menchen]

I always thought average was the same as mean, but will admit that Tom's quoted definition from the OED does match at least some practice. Newscasters often talk about the "average" price of a home, when the median is being quoted. Better written reports, IMHO, will use the term "median" to be clear.

[Glenn E.]

I always thought average was the same as mean, but will admit that Tom's quoted definition from the OED does match at least some practice. Newscasters often talk about the "average" price of a home, when the median is being quoted. Better written reports, IMHO, will use the term "median" to be clear.

This.

Average usually means mean in the US, though as Eric points out talking heads (and advertisers) sometimes confuse it with median. More reputable sources will actually say median when that's what they intend.

Mode is rarely used outside of mathematics. The most common representative of a set is typically less interesting than the middle one (in a sorted set) or the mean.

But as I already attempted to correct, this thread isn't actually about mathematically average Port. It's about Port that you might rate 75-79 - which I've now corrected to "Fair" or as Tom defined it "sufficient but not ample." Phil's use of "Ok" would also be accurate. It's Port that is neither "good" nor "bad" but something in the middle.

I rated as low as 80 this past weekend at the Taylor vertical. (And as high as 98.) But I still didn't drop down into the 75-79 range because, in my mind, even the worst Ports we tasted were still "good." Maybe I was being too generous because several of the early 80s Ports were fairly hot, but as I recall everyone else was giving similar scores. I don't recall any ratings below 80 from anyone, but we did taste 22 Ports so my memory might not be 100%.

[Eric Menchen]

I rated as low as 80 this past weekend at the Taylor vertical. (And as high as 98.) But I still didn't drop down into the 75-79 range because, in my mind, even the worst Ports we tasted were still "good." Maybe I was being too generous because several of the early 80s Ports were fairly hot, but as I recall everyone else was giving similar scores. I don't recall any ratings below 80 from anyone, but we did taste 22 Ports so my memory might not be 100%.

Well, there were a few TCA tainted bottles that were not scored. If you had to given them a score, what would it be? Oh wait, I'm asking the wrong person.

[Glenn E.]

I rated as low as 80 this past weekend at the Taylor vertical. (And as high as 98.) But I still didn't drop down into the 75-79 range because, in my mind, even the worst Ports we tasted were still "good." Maybe I was being too generous because several of the early 80s Ports were fairly hot, but as I recall everyone else was giving similar scores. I don't recall any ratings below 80 from anyone, but we did taste 22 Ports so my memory might not be 100%.

Well, there were a few TCA tainted bottles that were not scored. If you had to given them a score, what would it be? Oh wait, I'm asking the wrong person.

I scored one of them 94 points, thankyouverymuch!

[Marc J.]

I always thought average was the same as mean, but will admit that Tom's quoted definition from the OED does match at least some practice. Newscasters often talk about the "average" price of a home, when the median is being quoted. Better written reports, IMHO, will use the term "median" to be clear.

If I recall correctly, an average is determined by dividing the total of the values by the number of values. The mean is the point where by half of the values lie above it and half of the values lie below it. Two different concepts that are actually confused with one another quite bit.