NR vs Rating on CT

On CT, some folks never rate, some rate sometimes, and some always rate. Seems that if the person does not like the style of wine but appreciates the quality, they do not rate. People seem much more willing to rate if there is a higher score. I try to rate as much as I can so I can look back on what I like/don’t like but there does seem to be a power to the CT rating that can impact a small winery’s business which I think about as well which might make me inclined to not rate. Why do you rate/not rate? Are you afraid of offending the winery/winemaker if you give a bad score? What do you do with your tasting notes? Do you look back at them?

I don’t give a numeric rating ever. I’ve never thought about wine that way when it comes to my own impressions.

I almost never provide a rating, good or bad.

The only time I do it now (and it’s extremely rare) is when I see a wine getting dumped on that I think is excellent. That almost never happens, as I only buy objectively fantastic wines!

The 100 point scoring system:

1. implies unrealistic precision / differentiation in a single taster
2. has tremendous variance between tasters
3. used differently, sometimes projecting final quality, and sometimes current drinking quality.

These are among the reasons I don’t assign a score. Joe, some folks might not score for the reasons you state, but I suspect most just don’t buy into it.

I’m in the “rate sometimes” camp. To answer your questions:

1. I will rate a wine when I have the time, desire, and energy to evaluate the wine as stringently as I require of myself when I’m going to give a rating; frequently, I simply do not have the desire to do this, particularly if it’s a producer/bottling/vintage with which I have recent experience, and no meaningful changes have taken place since my last rating.

2. No.

3. Write them — first in my TN notebook, and then transcribed into CT at a later date. (I’m not sure I understand your question here.)

4. Yes.

I recently received some negative commentary on one of my CT reviews because I chose to rate a 2018 NV cab below 90pts.

I don’t score bottles based on potential upside, I score then based on where they are at in their journey/maturation to better inform anyone reading whether I think the bottle should be opened or held.

Too many people out there that think ratings should only be between 90 and 100pts. It’s foolish and dilutes the value of even providing a score in the first place.

I’ve used Cellartracker for over 10 years now. I’ve never scored a wine, I never will. The narrative is where I find the value, both in the notes I write and those I follow and appreciate. I know everyday wine geeks use the system to help them understand a wine and how it rates for them but personally I don’t care if someone scores or not. Give me a great narrative any day.

Brady and Tyler have provided some of the reasons I have never given wines scores. And even if I wanted to start now, trying to back calibrate everything would be a non-starter. I occasionally will add a ‘very good’ or ‘good’ sort of marker at the end of a note if I feel I need to make that point clear. For the most part the notes will stand for themselves. They are useful to some and useless to others. Much as I find the notes of others.

In the vast majority of cases the scores you see on CT are a quick off the top of their heads sort of thing rather than any real measured and calibrated scoring. Which is why the vast majority of scores are in such a narrow range. You’re not going to get a real useful scale if people automatically think every wine they like should have a 90+ score. And worse, that every score below that means the wine is ‘bad’ somehow.

I use a score often in CT, but I never post scores here and don’t think they have any value outside of my own clerical records. I use scores in CT so I can sort by score over a time period and see what I really liked. Easier to do a quick- what did I like best in 2021-by looking at scores instead of reading hundreds of my own notes. That being said, I realize scores are pretty silly and I can care less what another person scores a wine. Unless I know that person and understand his/her palate.

I used to put scores but stopped. Looking at my own ratings from 4, 5, 6 years ago, I disagree with a lot of them as my preferences have drastically changed. I mainly note things like acidity, tannin, level of fruit, etc and rarely used descriptors like raspberries/blackberries/etc since those are pretty much useless to me.

100%. Ditto. Like he said. Same here. Idem. Brother from another mother. Yep.

Except I’ve been using CT for 8 years.

Same. I also found I wasn’t terribly consistent in the number rating vs. descriptions. I generally give more weight to the descriptions of the wines in CT vs. numerical values, so this helps align to my use too.

I don’t score wines, but will say it’s a sad individual that complains about a score another wine enthusiast gives.

I just rate other people’s tasting notes.

I post a score if I have something relevant to compare the wine to. I leave it blank if I have no point of comparison.

I don’t score wines

Seeing the varying views on wines around a tasting table, shows that palate preference has a major influence on how we appreciate a wine. Indeed I’ve tasted the same wine hours, even minutes apart, and formed a differing opinion on it. Different bottles of the same wine/vintage have been noticeably different experiences over time (even ignoring possible bottle variation).

Hence for me a score is meaningless, and a score out of 100 implies accuracy that simply isn’t there. As an aside, skewing that scale so that it’s really a 90-100 scale might mitigate some such concerns, but adds a fawning ‘everyone’s a winner’ façade, which might be useful for critics wanting to stay in winery good books / increase likelihood of being quoted on shelf-talkers, but is unnecessary for us amateurs.

In terms of scales, I’ve more respect for the Italian attitude, that if you have to score wines, their leading publications used to do it on an integer 0-3 or 0-5 scale. Even then I’d be scratching my head at some ratings, but that’s their palate(s) and not mine, reminding me that I feel the whole concept of scoring wines to be rather misguided, but worse than that, badly abused by critics, wine shops and wineries, all happy that scores (and medals / trophies) help drive sales. As a wine enthusiast that sees this effect, I want nothing to do with such a system.

All that said, if you want to score wines, go ahead and do it. If you find it useful, then that’s all that matters.

I always score wines (gives my library structure and allows for a quick search of best and worsts, vintage and regional preferences, etc). And I love that most other CT users do it too for the same reasons and as it helps a lot to see in a second which wines or vintages of a particular wine are crowd favorites.

I like to be able to sort vintages or other subgroups by my favorites, so I rate when I can.

While I’m fortunate enough to get some positive feedback through CT comments, every now and then I get people saying my score is just too low (or I just don’t “get” the wine). When I explain that instead of using the 90-100 rating scale, I prefer to use the whole 50-100 scale, many often tell either tell me I’m wrong or I’m an idiot.

There’s two ‘ratings’ one can do in CT, one is the numerical 100 point score. The other is the CT “did you like this wine?” That one can answer Neutral, liked it, or didn’t like it.

While I don’t use the numerical 100 point scale when writing my tasting notes, I will often indicate whether I liked the wine or not. Sometimes I forget to tick the box when adding my tasting note in CT though, so there’s not much to read into a ‘neutral’ note vs. one where I say I ‘liked’ the wine. I try to write tasting notes that can give future me, and others a sense of what the wine was like to drink, and how it may be in the future.

Personally, the way I write my CT, I try not to write anything I wouldn’t say to the winemaker face to face if I was tasting their wines. But that doesn’t mean I will not be critical of a wine. If I really dislike a wine, I tend not to post any tasting note. In small part because I don’t want to trample on a wine by only saying it’s bad or I didn’t like it. But the biggest part is that I can’t often be bothered to take the time to write a tasting note on a wine that I don’t find at least a bit compelling. At that point I’m reaching in my cellar for another bottle.