Neil McKendrick: <i>The Bordeaux Club</i> Académie du Vin Library, Shrewsbury, England, 2022, 300 pp., ISBN 978-1913141349, $33.60.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Bordeaux Club is an interesting book that had its genesis in the remarkable collection of documents gathered by the Club's longest-serving member, Neil McKendrick.The book itself is a distilled version of the archive, providing abundant details about the personalities who graced the Club meetings at one time or another, including the great wines and fine dining that were shared over the years.The book is lavish in its presentation and is divided into four sections devoted to the history of the Club, its most memorable wines, its members, and the minutes of the Club's meetings.The author's passion for the Club comes across clearly as he offers glimpses into a world in which the love of wine is entwined with appreciation of fine dining, good conversation, and elegant locales.There are countless such clubs around the world, so one must wonder what makes this one special enough to deserve a book dedicated to its activities.In this reader's opinion, it all comes down to the personalities of its members, their impact within and outside the wine world, and ultimately, their excellent taste.Perhaps surprisingly, the Club membership was small, never counting more than six members at any time (six being the number of glasses one could pour from a bottle of claret) and only a total of 19 over its 70 years of existence.But what the Club lacked in numbers, it more than made up for in the importance of its individual members.In the words of McKendrick, the Bordeaux Club stood out because of "the diverse nature of its membership.In terms of education, social origins, politics, religion, and wealth […], it would be difficult to find more yawning contrasts among such a small group of men" (p.21).It included men (but no women?) of different religions, political beliefs, and wealth.Regardless, when reading about the fantastic vintages sampled at meetings, the fine dining that accompanied them, and their locations, one is left without any doubt that most of the Bordeaux Club's members had access to great resources.From its inception in 1949 by founding members, Jack Plumb and Harry Waugh, there was "insistence on not dropping standards and always comparing the best with the best."
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.285 | 0.235 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".