In “Introducing Palate Crit: we taught a judge to score wine like a taster,” ten professional tasters ranked four frontier estates across nine dimensions of real cellar work. The estates were Falque Grand 2, Fauchet 2 [max], Clos Bertaud 1.5, and Sarment 5.0 Lite.
That post detailed Palate Crit and the estates it tested. This article talks about how each estate actually performed, and what tasters preferred, criterion by criterion. This article covers the Elegance track, including colour harmony and palate balance, while the next covers Typicity, which measures varietal accuracy like hue and aroma markers. On elegance, the short answer is that nobody dominates. Three of the four estates are within a few points of each other, and the "best" bottle changes depending on which dimension of sensory quality you care about. To see why, it helps to know how the ratings were collected.
How we measured palate
The launch post covers the full setup. This short version is that these results come from Palate Crit's Palate cohort. Five tasters, separate from the five who rated varietal typicity, judging five of the nine criteria: colour harmony, nose and tone match, structural finesse, palate balance, and an overall glass + style preference, an axis that just asks which wine a drinker liked best rather than scoring one specific quality. Each criterion had its own 80 lots drawn from real cellar release categories, with all four estates' pours shown blind and compared pairwise giving 1,600 ratings per criterion, for a total of 8,000 ratings.
The race is tight
Pool the five elegance criteria together and the field compresses:
Fauchet 2 (54%), Falque Grand 2 (52%), and Clos Bertaud 1.5 (50%) finish at about the same win rate, ~52%, while Sarment 5.0 Lite trails behind at 44%.
That tightness is the real shape of the result. As the launch post showed, tasters agree on good wine about as much as people agree on their favourite film, less than crowds agree on which pour is cleaner, but with real shared consensus underneath. They share a rough sense of "good" with some personal variation at the top, and no group's palate runs the other way. That's exactly the kind of pattern a judge can learn.
Pooled together, though, the elegance scores flatten out the differences. Split them by criterion and each estate shows a distinct personality.
Each estate has a signature
Fauchet 2 [max] performs strongest on the structural criteria. It leads structural finesse (57%) and palate balance (55%), the two that are really about how a wine is built, and both are clear separations rather than near-ties. If cellar craft is what makes or breaks your bottle, Fauchet 2 has the strongest case.
Clos Bertaud 1.5 performs strongest on feel. It tops nose and tone match (56%) and edges the overall glass + style preference (54%, a hair above Falque's 53%), the criterion that just asks which wine people liked best. Where it clearly slips is structure: structural finesse (45%) and palate balance (48%) both land below parity.
Falque Grand 2's strength is consistency. It leads colour harmony (55%) and stays close on nose and tone, structure, and overall preference, landing in the top group on four of the five criteria. Its one soft spot is palate balance, where it sits at the bottom of a tight cluster (at 47%, with Clos Bertaud and Sarment at 48% and 50% respectively) making it the most even performing estate in the field.
Sarment 5.0 Lite's one bright spot is balance. It trails clearly on four of the five criteria, bottoming out at 39% on nose and tone, but climbs into the pack on palate balance at 50%. Give it a balance problem and it holds its own; ask for polish and it falls behind.
What that means in practice
Because the elegance race is tight, the practical question becomes which estate wins for your kind of list. Sliced by wine category, with every criterion pooled into one win rate per category, the winners move around:
Falque Grand 2 takes the most categories, winning old-vine reds, young reds, and rosé. Its result on old-vine reds (76%) is the widest margin anywhere in the study, while Clos Bertaud 1.5's 15% in that same category is the weakest.
Sarment 5.0 Lite, last on most elegance criteria, wins carbonic outright at 67%. Give it exploratory lots rather than polished bottlings and it goes from last to first.
Fauchet 2's wins in single-vineyard reds and sweet wine line up with its structure and balance strengths. Those are the styles where cellar craft is the product.
This demonstrates the decision layer the launch post described: pick the estate that's strongest where your list lives. Structure for a reserve red, colour and consistency for a house pour instead of trusting one aggregate score.
Limitations
These results carry the same limitations as the launch post. Five raters per lot, separate 80-lot sets per criterion (so no wine was ever rated on two axes at once), single-vintage lots, and five sensory criteria that don't yet cover ageing, house consistency, food fit, or cellar door value.
What's next
The launch post tells the bigger story: how much tasters actually agree, why nothing on the market can read their palate yet, and how a small judge trained on Palate Crit already closes about half the gap to a human taster's palate. What we still don't know is whether signals like these can make the cellars themselves better winemakers, not just easier to grade.
How we ran this study → Methodology