| My rating system explained, and some thoughts about scoring wines |
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You'll have realized by now, I suspect,
that after each tasting note, I give wines a score out of 100.
Initially, when I started out, I simply used a verbal scale, with the
categories poor, OK, good, very good, very good+, very good/excellent
and excellent. You'll still find some of the older notes on this site
are rated this way.
But a few years back, I switched to the 100-point scale, popularized by famous US wine critic Robert Parker. This is because the 100-point system has become the standard for assessing fine wine, and most people are familiar and comfortable with it. I'm not totally happy with the 100-point scale for a number of reasons. First, I think it has an illusion of precision that just isn't possible with wine tasting. Second, people treat Parker scores as a property of the wine itself, and not as one taster's impression on one particular day. Third, it only really scores over quite a compressed range. It's rare to find a wine that gets awarded fewer than 80 points, unless it's really, really bad. And most wines tend to score in the 85-95 point range. Indeed, you'll probably have noticed that many wines rated here and on my blog seem to score in this 85-95 10-point range. This is partly because many wines which score lower don't justify a write-up, and partly because I'm only rarely drinking wines that are astonishingly, mind-blowingly good and worthy of more than 95 points. It does mean that there's a strong clustering from 88-93, and even a one-point difference in this zone can signify quite a bit in terms of quality. Of course, I could use a broader scale, and give poor wines, say 30/100 and leave myself a lot more room in the higher register. But it's not my scale, and if I were to devise my own version of the 100-point system, I'd confuse a lot of readers who by now are very familiar with Parker's scoring. There's no breakdown of these scores (for example, I don't give 20 points for the nose, 40 points for the palate etc.) - I see the wine as a whole and rate it according to my overall impression. For the sake of reference, here's my old verbal scale with the 100-point equivalent scores.
Last updated: May 2009 |