The 100 point scale is pretty useless.

I was responding to something that my friend Panos wrote, and realized that it would make for an interesting discussion.

There have been so many discussions about the 100 point scale, and most of them are about its deficiencies. Whether it is about score inflation, tasting conditions and the variability of wine or the shenanigans that are sometimes part of barrel tastings etc, etc. I have used 20 point and for the last thirty years the 100 point scale.

So here is my take for what it is worth. There is nothing objective about the 100 point scale. It is a personal impression of a wine at a given moment, and for that one single taster. The wine may change, the taster may change, conditions may change. I find my notes are consistent, but there is a small percentage of wines where the score is significantly higher or lower. Nature of the beast; especially when you are tasting younger wines

So if the same taster can find differences, how is it possible to take a random critic or person as gospel and spend your hard earned cash on a bottle? Well you may say, at least try and find a critic whose palate is aligned to yours. God help you!

There are two kinds of critics. One, a critic with a very defined palate, who scores a wine according to whether he likes the wine and finds merit. John Gilman is a good example of this; he doesn’t play games, and if he doesn’t like a wine, he scores it appropriately. John’s palate often does overlap with mine but we have differed many, many times.

Then there is the second type. All things to everybody. He may not like a wine, but may be able to extrapolate that it is well made and worthy of a high points score. It is bad enough that the 100 point scoring is inherently flawed, and to be honest not very useful. Now you have got some ding dong scoring not based on his own palate, but what he thinks somebody else’s is.

I could go on and spend some time on score inflation. I will not, except to say it is there of course, and the way we market wine incentivizes critics to adjust their scores ever higher.

So you have a subjective scale which is inherently flawed, judging wines that change with maturity, scored by someone who at best may give you an honest appraisal but if you choose the wrong one, you will end up getting a dishonest appraisal. I can’t see much merit in the 100 point scale.

So when you see me scoring a wine, take it for what it is worth, a note to myself of how good a wine is on that particular day. Anything more, you do at your own risk.

Useful for sales.

Like most of us, I used to score wines when I was younger. I gave that up a number of years ago. My scores never made that much sense, even to me. I esp. found it hard with respect to German wines where I had too much of a tendency to score wines higher as I went up the pradikat levels but then wanted to actually drink the Kabinetts and Spatlesen. Also, I have always found it hard to score both say a really well made wine from lesser terroir and with maybe lesser ambition (say a Bourgogne) and a well made but not exceptionally made wine with more ambition from say a premier cru.

That said, I recognize the need to scores for wine critics. I remember the days before Parker where you would read tasting notes from British wine critics without having any real idea of whether they liked the wine. I understand that I was supposed to glean this from the eloquence of their writing but too often they were too tied to the wine trade to write anything that was clear. I remember when Parker was a breath of fresh air in wine criticism.

As I have mentioned on this board a number of times, I don’t believe in objectively rating wines. I don’t really even understand the concept. Does anyone really rate a wine highly that they don’t like or are people just deluding themselves? Also, it generally has seemed to me that objective ratings tend to be bigger is better and since those are not the wines I like best these ratings are meaningless to me. [Is it possible for a wine to objectively be rate 100 points even if nobody likes it???]

I like John’s approach much better. Stick it out there. I rate this wine higher because I like it better. Subscribe if you like the same types of wines I like. Don’t if you are looking for high scores for a wine I don’t like.

I agree with this and basically no longer score wines. What I am looking for from a tasting note is a clear and deep description of the person’s encounter with the wine. If you loved it, if it stood out to you as exceptional as compared to other wines, just tell us that and tell us why you feel that way. That’s infinitely more helpful than a score.

The problem is that critics taste so many wines that they don’t really have the time to write that kind of note, or even really the time or ability to fully encounter a wine and sit with it as opposed to just taking a sip. It’s a structural problem with being a critic. I prefer drinkers’ notes, as you get here or on CT, to critics notes, even though there are many drinkers notes that clearly reflect lack of expertise and have to be discounted.

Gotta pump up the jam…

To anyone who is not American the idea of giving 50 points to something undrinkable makes no sense at all. When you first realise that 90 points is only 80% it comes across as some kind of fraud.

The argument about scoring at all is a different matter.

As someone with a wine critic in the family I would like to play devil’s advocate to some of Mark’s points:

1. I’ve found that the person is question will never give a wine its final grade without revisiting it at least once. First impression is not good enough.

2. I don’t see the fault behind transcending our own palate when grading a wine. If it has complexity and structure, it warrants a higher score. If it has balance - even if all of the factors are amped up - likewise. Levels of tannin and acidity, amount of discernable elements, etc, can be perceived regardless of our taste.

3. there are extra sensory factors that go into the final grade. The first taste is blind, but sometimes what ‘corrects’ the grade (usually by no more than half a point, on the 20 point scale) might be a desire to encourage the use of a maligned grape variety, to encourage a previously underachieving producer who is getting things going again, and so on. Sometimes the opposite happens - discouragement from not grading a famous producer’s wines too poorly - and in those cases, as a matter of principle, I really disagree.

4. In some cases I can tell from the TN whether it’s a sincere, enthusiastic good grade, or a ‘I’ve got to hand it to them’ good grade.

5. last but not least, there’s the comparative factor, and this is where I really agree that subjectivity is king. With wines tasted in a single sitting, each grade will be defined to some extent by a quality standard of what’s on the table, and not just by the person’s objective discernment. Sometimes a would be 15,5 gets 16 because a would be 14,5 got a 15 (in the same tasting) due to any of the factors I’ve mentioned before. I will add though, that at least one time the critic I’m talking about got a wine he already tasted, blind, and scored it again the exact same way. Not representative, but food for thought.

For the most part I find assigning numerical scores to the wines I drink pretty meaningless and opt not to do so. Aside from the issues of being consistent over time, I also struggle to conceptualise what scores actually mean and how to differentiate between them. For example, what’s the difference between a 94 and a 95 pt wine? Aside from the obvious answer that one must be better than the other, unless your tasting those wines side by side, I find it pretty meaningless.

I do think that there may be a certain amount of merit to assigning scores so when doing a vertical, horizontal, or tasting all new releases like many critics do. In that sense, the numerical score (whatever scale you may chose to use) can be an indication of how wines are drinking relative to each other. In other words, you scored one cuvée 94pt and another 96pt so there’s at least some vague concept that you must have preferred one to another that day. But aside from those niche use cases, a wine’s numerical score is pretty meaningless to me. Especially if it’s lacking in any descriptors of what the wine actually tastes like.

And to be a dreaded 89 point wine, for shame that you serve this.

When some “normal” person says wine people are elitist they should enter this thread as evidence.

The reason I find the 100 point scale useful is that I, and many other professional or amateur tasters, are not eloquent enough to really convey its qualities by just describing the taste and feeling it evokes in a note. If I know the taster, the combination of tasting notes and score is useful to me.

As one example, I appreciate the notes of a certain board member who shares TNs often. But because he doesn’t use the 100 point scale, I have no clue whether the $1,000 bottle tasted drinks like a village or Grand Cru wine. I can, however, tell whether it’s roughly my style or not based on the description. So for me, both are needed to be really useful: a good tasting note and a (subjective) scoring system.

You can just show them this whole forum really

I think there’s a difference between having this conversation in a wider forum around non wine people and here where the sole purpose is to have a space to get super geeky about any and all aspects of wine.

I like the instagram rating scale;
Every wine out of your own cellar is perfect. This is especially true if it is a baller wine.
If you don’t like the baller’s baller wine, it is because you either have the palate of a yak or lack the months of tasting experience of the baller.
If someone else doesn’t like your baller wine - you inform them their example was flawed because yours is (of course) perfect.
The end.


Overall, the issue I have is the score compression that has occured over the years. Now-a-days, I see almost everything critiqued at or pre-release is between 87-94. Some critics push that out a bit if scoring older wines.

Two points:

• what is better: a (100p) scale or none at all ?
• every rating (or description) is worth as much as the taster’ s ability …

A point scale isn’t going to tell you whether a wine tasted like a village wine or a Grand Cru wine, just a numerical score. Certainly people are free to, and at times do do, score village wines high and Grand Cru wines lower.

To you’re point though, I’ve definitely read many tasting notes that while very informative about how a wine is drinking and its style, I couldn’t tell if the taster actually enjoyed the wine or not, and that’s certainly something people who chose not to assign a numerical score to a wine ought to be cognisant of. You should still have some assessment of how good the wine was aside from just how it tasted.

A rating is a noisy measure of quality. The noisier the rating, the less useful the rating will be to others. The lower the correlation of your preferences to those of the reviewer, the less useful the rating will be to you. I don’t expect perfection from ratings, just some signal.

I would say that using the term “baller” automatically disqualifies your opinion about anything.

I’ve never found an 89 point wine to taste better than a 98 point wine.

I find the ratings quite useful depending on who is doing the rating. I know which ratings to trust as far as aligning with my own taste and which to dismiss.

Useless? Hardly. Perfect? Of course not. There is no perfect way to rate wine and we all know how much a wine can change even in the glass.

Vintage ratings in particular are useful.

For me, much more problematic than what scale you use are the limitations of how many of the tastings resulting in “scores” actually work. Small barrel samples, pre-malo, to forecast whether a wine is 3 or 6 decade proposition? Seriously? A 40 ml pour as part of a 50-wine extravaganza - and you think your brief dalliance with that tiny sample of wine (how long was the bottle open, was it from the top or the bottom, what was the serving temperature) allows you to foretell how a bottle over dinner might go in 7 years’ time?

This ‘groundhog day’ thread was posted a day late.