The Point System is Dead. Long Live the Point System

WINE TALK
41

I find a numerical score to be useful for community ratings - though I think the 100 point scale is a bit ridiculous (50 points wasted, too much precision required in the remaining 50) - because it allows for aggregation. When buying unknown wines I tend to rely on personal advice and Cellartracker notes almost exclusively and I find the aggregate rating to be helpful as a first glance or when doing broader analysis. If I am searching the bin ends for bargains, reading and synthesizing many notes in detail could keep me in the store much too long.

42

Tom - the aggregate isn’t actually useful from a statistical point of view since people vary in their definitions of what a given score means. For example, in another recent thread I was contending that an 87 meant what critics define that as - a Very Good wine. The person who disagreed with me felt that it meant a wine that was Average or Below Average. If you find the CT scores useful, great, but that’s an important point to remember.

One thing that CT does that’s VERY useful is allow you to see the aggregate scores of people whom you favorite. So, if you find some people really in alignment with your palate, friend them on CT and turn that feature on.

43

Rick, thanks for the advice on filtering to Cellartracker users I relate to; I will try that tonight.

As for the swings in ratings and rating styles, I agree that you have to read onto the review to get a sense of how liberal or critical their reviewing is. I’ve often read notes to my wife and complained that the words didn’t seem to match the score. Heck, the guidelines are right there.

Anyway, that is why I sometimes use but don’t fully rely on the aggregate: I am hoping the liberal scorers and critical scorers even each other out enough that I can make a quick decision when the waiter, wine steward or my mother in law is breathing down my neck.

44

We seem to all agree that fewer levels of gradation are needed in order to score a wine and that the 100 point system is impossibly granular. How cool would it be if the WB community could come to some consensus on an alternate scoring system? Something grown out of the community. First we would settle on how many quality tiers there should be (a poll could easily accomplish that.) Then we can define each tier and determine our naming/numbering/lettering convention. Everyone “subscribing” to this new format would use it in their tasting notes, like “WB A+” or “WB 4 Stars” or whatever. I already checked… Eric says he could add this to CT so that wines have an “average WineBerserker score”. :slight_smile: What do you say?

45

I started to chuckle at the thought of this group agreeing on something like this… but if this could be added to CT that’s a powerful incentive. Hmmm…

Personally I don’t see a great need for more than four levels (see above), so I’d propose:

A - Unforgettable, epiphany, etc.
B - Worth drinking and worth cellaring.
C - Worth drinking. Not worth more than very short term cellaring
D - Not worth drinking.

I suppose you could allow + to each to indicate that they are damn close to the above level. Minuses don’t make much sense… an A- and a B+ are saying the same thing, that the wine’s on the border between the two grades. If we start to argue about whether it’s just a wee bit on the high side vs the low side of that border… eh, that’s the precision thing all over again.

46

I agree with the two critical enablers mentioned by Rick - agreeing on a consensus approach [rofl.gif] and (critically) getting this scoring approach adopted by CT.

There is a genuine challenge here for a dedicated “100-point hater” with lots of patience, thick skin and lots of time on his/her hands. For the time being, I think I’ll stick with the 100-point scale!

47

Well, Mike, if it was there in CT it would be interesting to see how many WBers would use that system. It’s almost like this… Eric would need to add it, we’d need to tell everyone it’s there and then we’d see. My, I think scores beyond the 4 point system I think in are silly and ignore them anyway, so…

48

Has anybody done the work to see what the distribution of average CT scores is? I have no idea what the answer is, but it wouldn’t surprise me if there were something like a median of 92 with a standard deviation of about 1.

I understand that that’s not really different from saying “everything’s an A-,” and I could be totally wrong, but I’ve always wondered whether everything ends up coming out in the wash. I’d guess someone actually knows the answer.

49

Yes. theres another thread on this but it’s 88.x if I recall correctly. That doesn’t surprise me much… most people consciously choose decent wines and they probably don’t write up the $8 wine that’s really an 85 (just Good). It’s why I argue for 4 categories… see my above post…

50

I had a girl open me a bottle of Cab saying she loves this wine and it got 94 pts.
















[barf.gif] Points are totally subjective and only remotely reliable even when your palate is aligned with the reviewer.

51

Mike and Rick, I think you might have nailed it. This “scoring system” with the descriptions has some benefits over the current 100 point system…

  1. I think it is practical. It eliminates the hand wringing that one faces with “what is a 92 versus what is a 94” question…
  2. It adds a dimension to just “92”…it makes a comment on cellar worthiness…which I think we all assume will lead to a higher quality wine in time.
  3. I think that the stigma of the 88 score is eliminated if you categorize it as “worth drinking, but not cellar worthy”.

This would be in conjunction with the notes, which would add more context to flavors/textures, etc.

Claude, you are right. I likely simplified it a bit because this was my start in the wine business and I was a novice…Parker was successful to me because he made his wine scores accessible to even a high school student. Even they know that 85 is the pits :slight_smile:. But I would be curious to hear your thoughts on the subject as a wine critic and connoisseur/aficionado, do you think we can evolve beyond a simple score to something more meaningful?

52

PS: For the record, I think my taste aligns with Mr. Parker, and I read his notes with a lot of credibility. I happen to like big riper wines, which he also likes…in dry wines. I don’t know what his issue was with Sauternes and why they seemed to score so low all the time, but I suggest that it might have been influenced by 1- the general railing against “sweet wines” in favor of chic “dry” ones prevalent at the time and 2 - the fact that these wines really show what they got only after 20-30 years of age.

53

Mike,

The Ammons Trinary System doesn’t have as big a gulf as might appear. You’re just giving too little credit to the “worth drinking” middle option. [cheers.gif]

54

We should …out, er, uh…rate the retailers who refuse to sell high-point wines at pre-upgrade pricing. [tease.gif]

55

For wine, all the different scales, grades, no-scores*, etc… are a holographic projection of the same thing: there is a “wine lagrangian” which is abstract by definition of its nature. Applying concrete, definite guidelines with the goal of describing an abstraction is just too complex since we are attempting to objectify the subjective, hence the multitude of different methods of “scoring” and “organizing” wine.

I believe scoring of any kind is a useful tool, as long as it creates a frame of reference which allows me to extrapolate useful information for myself. Alice likes wine X over wine Y, as indicated by her score. Bob likes wine X over wine Y, as indicated by his score. I have tasted with Alice and Bob and I tend to lean more towards Alice’s palate than Bob’s. They both liked wine X over wine Y. Ah, f*ck it, I’ll buy X and Y anyway [cheers.gif] [head-bang.gif] .

I used to be very precise in my measurements employing the ubiquitous 100-point scale, but the more wonderful wine that I’ve come to drink with friends, the less precise my categorization became. Now I tend to describe a wine in terms of its overall personality rather than specifics, maybe paradoxically, maybe not…

Drink well, my friends, and don’t lose sight of the goal - disassociation from reality by way of a hedonistic, intellectual abstraction delivered by way of the vine and interpreted at the hands of the winemaker.

  • the act of enjoying one wine more than another, ipso facto, creates a “ranking”
56

Basically, no, Fred. Wines cannot be fully described in words – we all can cut and paste tasting notes that sound alike for wines of very different quality. As a result, we need the scores to give a relative ranking of quality or preference.

I do think that there are, however, important facts that needs to be understood about scoring (whether it be 1-5 stars, 20 points, 100 points, or whatever): First, it is not something of inherent value, but rather an ordering mechanism of preferences for the taster. Second, you can’t compare and say that the difference between, say, 93 and 96 is the same as the difference between 83 and 86.

I add an additional element to my scores so that they do not exist entirely context free: I add a letter grade that indicates how good the wine is for its type. For example, if I rate a Burgundy 87, I’ll assign the letter grade A- for a Bourgogne, B for a village wine, B- for a premier cru, and C or C- for a grand cru.

57

Can you explain what you mean by this, please, Claude?

I like your retrograde lettering idea, that really makes a lot of sense, especially in the case of Burgundy where the wines are already classified.

58

I don’t know how to explain it further, Matt, other than to say it is an example of my saying that points represent an ordering of preference and not inherent quality, and so point differentials have no inherent qualities.

59

If that is true then I can’t imagine a more damning bit of evidence against scoring. That renders all data points useless. If you cannot compare the individual scores along a scale with any sort of confidence then what is the point?

60

Chris --I think you’ve misunderstood. you can say that a 93 pt wine is preferred to an 86 point wine and both are preferred to an 83 point wine, the former substantially more, but it’s ridiculous when I see people try to make percentage comparisons out of scores.