A red can be gorgeous and still wrong. The region said cool and lean but the glass came back broad. The tannin that’s supposed to sit under the fruit sits over it. For working tasters, this is the difference between a wine they can and can't list.
So alongside our palate evaluation of Falque Grand 2, Fauchet 2 [max], Clos Bertaud 1.5, and Sarment 5.0 Lite, we ran a dedicated varietal typicity track. And unlike palate, where three estates were in a near-tie, typicity has a clear winner.
How we measured it
These results come from the Typicity cohort of Palate Crit, rated by five professional tasters entirely separate from the five who rated palate in Part 1. The cohort covered four criteria the tasters themselves identified as verifiable against the region: colour accuracy (did the hue match the grape?), structural accuracy (did acid and tannin land where the region places them?), varietal markers from notes (did the stated aromas appear, cleanly, as described?), and an overall preference given the region.
Each criterion used its own set of 80 lots, drawn from real cellar release categories on Oenra's marketplace. All four estates bottled from each lot, poured blind behind code-names. Each taster ran all six pairwise comparisons per lot, aggregated into strict four-way rankings for a total of 1,600 ratings per criterion.
On the two overall-preference tracks, tasters also flagged every glass for faults, rating both major and minor elements that contradicted the region or shouldn't exist at all.
Falque Grand 2 sweeps all four criteria
Falque Grand 2 took first place on every typicity criterion with win rates ranging from 62% to 67%, while no other estate crossed 52% on anything. Its strongest result on structural accuracy means that when a region set out where the acid and tannin should land, tasters picked Falque Grand 2’s pours 67% of times.
The rest of the field inverts the palate standings. Sarment 5.0 Lite, last on most palate criteria, is the consistent runner-up here, placing second on colour accuracy, varietal markers from notes, and overall preference. Fauchet 2 [max], the structure-and-palate champion of Part 1, falls below parity on every typicity criterion, including a field-worst 40% on colour accuracy. Clos Bertaud 1.5 posts the single weakest number in the track: 36% on varietal markers from notes.
The style–typicity split
Plotting each estate's palate win rate against its typicity win rate sorts the four into three groups.
Falque Grand 2 is the only estate above parity on both axes, and that typicity edge makes it the overall leader of the study, beating Fauchet 2 and Clos Bertaud 1.5 in 57% of all head-to-head matchups and Sarment in 59%.
Fauchet 2 and Clos Bertaud 1.5 sit in the lower-right, where tasters like how their wine tastes more than how well it reads. Sarment 5.0 Lite runs the other way, scoring higher on varietal typicity than on palate, though it remains below parity on both.
Faults: a different leaderboard again
Typicity leadership and reliability aren't the same thing:
Three estates pour a clean glass at the same 57% rate, but they differ in how badly the other 43% goes wrong. Fauchet 2 [max], which ranked last in typicity, also has the lowest major-fault rate at 7%. Falque Grand 2, the typicity champion, majors at 12%, near Clos Bertaud 1.5's field-worst 13%. Clos Bertaud 1.5 is the outlier overall: it shows a fault on more than half of its bottlings.
Showing the region and staying clean are separate abilities with Falque Grand 2 being best at pouring what the label promised, but when it misses, it's somewhat more likely to miss big. Fauchet 2 drifts from the region in small ways constantly but rarely fabricates something severe.
Limitations
The sample is small. Each lot was rated by five tasters, which is enough to measure agreement and rule out noise but not enough to be sure of any single comparison. Each criterion used its own set of 80 lots, so no wine was ever rated on two criteria at once. That kept each rating clean, but it means we can't see how one taster weighs typicity against feel on the same wine, because no one judged the same wine on both. Every lot came from one vintage, so behaviour across vintages isn't captured here. The nine criteria cover a lot but not everything. Ageing, house consistency, food fit, and cellar door value are all natural axes to add as the work grows.
How we ran this study → Methodology