I have never been a huge fan of the 100 point scale. Even before it got bastardized by most critics trying to outscore one another to the point it became meaningless, it seemed to suggest a spurious accuracy and objectivity.
Going to the UGC tasting, I thought I would try using the 20 point scale again. It was the first scoring system; I had used, both in my native England, and the first few years after I came over. When I started writing for a magazine, they switched to the 100 point scale, and I switched with them. It took some adjustment, but used it for many years, but never particularly liked it.
At the tasting, it came back easily. And I felt that I could use it with none of the scoring hyperbole of the 100 point scale. 18 was a good score, I reserved a 19 for my favorite wine the Lalande, and my low was 13.
I am going on a tear, and say the 20 point scale is the greatest thing since the invention of fish and chips, but it is a viable scale that works for me. I would also add that only once or twice a year will I ever taste a wine that will merit 20 points. The idea that a single vintage that has double digit 100 point wines, or one 100 point wine is better than another, is clearly a sign that it is no longer working.
I have been in a tasting group since 1998 that uses the 20 point rating scale. The group overall has been using the scale since 1986 (the group was initially founded in 1974). Our scoring rubric assigns potential points to specific aspect of the wine. While I feel the balance of those potential points is a little skewed (e.g., 2 potential points for color and clarity where that is rarely at question these days), overall I like it.
In 26 years of blind tasting I have only given a single handful of 20 point scores - all to what were eventually revealed to be highly worthy wines.
a 100 point scale allows for a greater level of specificity technically, the issue is the bell curve has just shifted really far to the right so the real scale is probably something like 80-100 at this point.
When was the 100 pt scale ever a real bell curve? Some of the lowest scores I’ve seen came from John Gilman and his road kill wines, and even those were scores in the 70s usually.
I’d love to see a real 100 pt scale be used but it won’t sell wine. Who wants to buy something with a shelf talker that says “80 pts” when by all accounts it might be a decent bottle?
technically as long as there is a distribution of scores that are not uniform it is a bell curve, the standard deviation of those scores from the mean has just significantly narrowed.
I fear I’m about to embarrass myself, but … isn’t the bell curve specifically a Normal distribution, and aren’t there other non uniform distributions than the Normal, eg Poisson?
….
To me this sort of discussion is a bit skewed (see what I did there) by the treatment of flawed wines. By flawed I don’t mean faulty (eg TCA) but rather utterly atypical or seriously misconceived - are they “not rated” like flawed wine, or placed on the spectrum, and thus require an extended range for the metric.
10 is for me barely commercial quality.
12 is event wine; palatable but not good.
14 -15 would be my house wine ( my current house wine Pitray is an exception at 16)
Etc etc
I have tasted wines that I scored 0. Effectively you still need the full spectrum of the 20 point scale, so that you can differentiate between normal dreck and abnormal dreck.
The abnormal dreck lives longer in the memory. There are nights I still wake up with night sweats having dreamt about the Marechal Fosch out of Pennsylvania that tasted of excrement and vomit. Giving it a 10 or even a positive score would not have done justice to its true horror.
