Ah, gotcha. I never rate wines or think of it in those terms, or haven’t for many years, though I can definitely list on the fingers of one hand those experiences that approached perfection.
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Alan and Max and a few others summed it up.
Seriously, if someone were to sit at my dinner table and spend any time wondering whether the wine we were having should be 98 or 99 or 100 points, I would look around to be sure the walls weren’t padded and I would hope Big Nurse was on vacation.
Is it good, do you love it and wish you had more of it? That’s about all you really need. Some wines are serviceable, some are damned good, and some are almost transcendent. But attempting to parse out degrees of goodness is a call for help.
As to 1100 wines, anyone who’s been in the business for a minute probably tastes more than that in a year. I know I have and still do, but even if I had only tasted three wines in my entire life, if I loved one I would have no hesitation in calling it 100 points or brilliant or whatever. Everyone has the right to enjoy whatever it is they enjoy.
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For me, a wine always gets tasted in a context. So, no pure 12 point (between 89 and 100) scale applies.
I have had many perfect experiences where I thought, “Man, this wine couldn’t be any more perfect right now.”
I used to call them “Bill Gates Moments,” as in, “Not even Bill Gates could spend his way to topping this moment!” Now, I simply refuse to call them “Elon Musk moments.” 
I also disdain the scale because people often rate wine in what I think of as ridiculous ways.
Example: I haven’t checked in years, but to my recollection, The Wine Advocate/Parker had never rated a sauvignon blanc with 100 points. Is it because nobody has ever made a fabulous home run sauvignon blanc? You’d think it would have happened here and there, as often as with any other grape. So grape bias ticks me off.
Is sauvignon down-rated because it isn’t a cabernet or Bordeaux? What the heck? That’s not a rating scale. That’s like saying Mick Jagger is not Caruso.
Here is Parker’s 100 point list, likely I am wrong, but that won’t stop me.
https://www.wine-searcher.com/robertparker
It is obvious that certain grapes are darlings and others not…but a philosophically true rating system would be able to ferret out 100 point wines based on comparing them to other wines made from the same grapes, not saying they fall short because they are not a big Bordeaux.
Sometimes, wine ratings strike me as asking Lester Bangs for another Led Zeppelin album to review. (Joke.)
So, me: “Blah blah blah…plenty of 100 point experiences.”
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I very much agree. I think there might be some strawmanning here happening unless I am misinterpreting. I am not saying I have tasted 1100 wines. Just that is how many I made a rating for. I agree that it would not make sense to sit at a dinner table spending time wondering about the points. I would much rather talk about the nuances or anything else in fact. I also don’t think it makes to rate a wine unless you have had several glasses of it and over many hours to see if/ how the wine evolves with air.
However, I do rate wines for my own personal reference. I use it as extra proxy for qpr, and sometimes as a guide for how many I may want to purchase. Not as a definitive thing, but as much as we like to think they are not, our memories are very flawed, so the points are a sort of check on memory and viceversa. Hopefully you aren’t consider me needing a “call for help” for that and I am misreading this.
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I would certainly suggest putting that thought and concentration into wondering ‘why’ the wine were so enjoyable (or indeed less enjoyable), than wasting such focus on debating whether it should be 97 or 98 points.
Having a focus on wines can still be a sociable thing, sharing what we experience, like and dislike about the wines and in doing so getting a feel for the different palate preferences of our friends, even if only to think “I ain’t wasting another delicate wine on that heathen!” 
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i think 100 points in this case is just a recognizable shorthand for incredibly memorable wines or wines that just check all the boxes, not really so specifically a wine that has been rated 100 points by a critic. IMO, theres a big difference between a personal 100 pointer and a critic 100 pointer. personally, i’d guess the former is actually a lot more rare than the latter: a personal 100 pointer (to me) requires catching the right bottle at the right time with the right people in the right situation, and honestly has roughly 0% to do with what a critic rated that wine.
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I very much do that. Most of my friends are not big wine drinkers, but I love figuring out what their preferences are so I can offer something that they love.
I think the sort of hidden importance of seeing how often someone thinks of a wine as 100 or 98… is that it demonstrates a level of expectations on possible outcomes. For example @YLee has very different expectations from a wine than someone who expects 1 in 100 wines to be 100 pts. In some sense YLee is helping create a higher standard for wine evolution, but on the other extreme the higher ratings can often be a bit more considerate to the wide range of intentions a winemaker might have.
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Greg, You are a better host than I am. If someone sat at my diner table and spent time debating the points rating of a wine that I served them, my wife would certainly not let me kick them out of the house, but I wouldn’t invite them back. Point taking/making is one of the worst attributes of our hobby. Everyone now considers themselves to be a wine expert, writing the next great American tasting note (it used to be novel, but that is too much work for our wine scoring scribes). Just enjoy and be in the moment, especially when sitting at someone else’s dinner table, be it in a home, restaurant, or picnic table.
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In the universe of fine wines produced year after year after year, I do not think a 100 is necessarily that rare. Whether you have access to that wine, and whether you subjectively agree it is 100, is another story. I wonder if we tend to over-think these things. I’ve definitely had some wines that I thought to myself, this is so archetype, so perfect, I cannot image that it can be made any better. I felt that about the 1989 Haut Brion. I have also had some wines that hit the pleasure buttons so intensely, that I was like wow, these are revelatory. Twice with 1989 Petrus, and two out of the three times that I had the 1982 Mouton. And then there are some wines that are just so in the moment, so part of the overall experience, like 2 years ago at a group dinner at the place that shall remain nameless, in a crowd of really gregarious people, everyone was dead quiet when we were enjoying the 1945 Kirwan. It was so memorable, so contemplative, coupled with the setting and the idea that this wine was made at the end of WWII, that I could see someone anointing this 100. We had some killer wines that night, but I chose not to score any of them but instead just take it all in, but this Kirwan certainly was an emotional wine. Not a perfect wine, but a wine that was perfect in that singular setting and moment in time.
Now to totally contradict myself, I actually did think about this very subject over the 2005 Vatan. I shared this wine with Carnes, Todd, Kane and Jorge. We all were wowed, like gobsmacked by this wine. It was utterly so compelling, so singular. And we still talk about it. Carnes ran out and bought every Vatan on the market! And I stopped drinking my young stash like Koolaide. I scored it a 97, and totally think that I under-scored it. Carnes, Todd and Kane gave it 98-99. Jorge prolly found a flaw, wasn’t “waxy” enough*. 
Why wasn’t this a 100? Perhaps it deserved it.
PS. think when Jorge says “waxy” with his heavy Dominican accent, he’s really saying “sexy”. So might make sense.
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Let me first say I’ve had six 100 pt wines (CA Cabs & Bordeaux) and only one is among my handful of “best” or favorite or transcendent wines I’ve had.
Also, I believe one can’t truly appreciate the light without experiencing the dark.
So- how rare should the transcendent wines be?
Rare enough so when you experience them you realize you just had something different from almost all the rest. Rare enough that you’re a bit dumbstruck because it’s been such a while since you last had one.
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Interesting take. I definitely agree with a good portion of this. I am not sure how this thread came to be discussing at the dinner table with guests though.
Why do you feel point taking/making is one of the worst attributes? I can see the damage that “points” have had on the wine world, but I don’t personally attribute it to rating a wine, but the influence of those rating them and the fact that the points are such a simplistic representation of the wine.
I think the thing confusing for me is Greg said “Everyone has the right to enjoy whatever it is they enjoy.” but for some reason, taking points is so bad that we would want to kick them out of our houses if they enjoyed it.
I only kick people out if they announce a point rating before we taste a wine.
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I kick them out if they disagree with my rating!
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I rarely score wines anymore, and mostly when I do it’s on a 20 point scale my blind tasting group has used for decades.
There have been 4 times in my 24 years in the group that I have given a 20. Each was a moving experience. One time I would have given a 21 - the 1970 Petrus that was part of a tasting in 2001. I had never had anything like it, and the experience resonates to this day. That’s what 100 points (expressed as 20) means to me.
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Accompanied by the equally useful:
- Don’t buy more
- Buy more
But not as nuanced as https://www.the-stupids.com/?p=2057
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Leibniz was far from a binary type of guy. He basically developed Calculus as we know it today. He’s also known for his Law of Continuity.
How would you know what a 100 point wine should taste like if you never tasted one or could not afford one?
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I was going to say, “Think of it like sex,” but for all I know, you may be right.
I guess it boils down to who you think the arbiter of 100 points is.
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I would never argue mathematics with you. However, from Wikipedia (among many other sources):
The modern binary number system, the basis for binary code, was invented by Gottfried Leibniz in 1689 and appears in his article Explication de l’Arithmétique Binaire . The full title is translated into English as the “Explanation of the binary arithmetic”, which uses only the characters 1 and 0, with some remarks on its usefulness, and on the light it throws on the ancient Chinese figures of Fu Xi.[1] Leibniz’s system uses 0 and 1, like the modern binary numeral system.
How’s retirement? I hope you are well and enjoying life.
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