Grand Vin Wine Merchants UK | Blog

Wine scores are now so invaluable to the consumer and merchant alike that they both underpin and are the focus of most offers and wine descriptions around the world. The digits given out of 5, 20 or 100 are used to describe and rate a wine in the most laconic of synopses, and a good score – occasionally stretching to three holy digits – has the power to double (or more) a wine’s value globally in a matter of minutes. Speaking on a personal note – not as an ambassador for the company or even the wine trade in general – I have never liked scoring. It has always seemed to me that to give a number to a wine makes as much sense as to give it an interpretive dance (something I do not recommend doing at tastings: the interrogation by psychiatrists is lengthy and the dry cleaning bills are prohibitive). In my mind, scoring seems logically and semantically unsound. Yet score away critics and colleagues do. I understand the appeal, we want to know quickly which wines were preferred, and tasti...

I love tasting wine, almost as much as I love drinking it. I love arguing about it, or for it. I’m unfailingly thrilled by the opportunities I have to try some of the world’s greatest, rarest or oldest wines. I attempt to convey a wine’s character and qualities in a way that I hope is helpful to fellow wine lovers. But I score wine with a heavy heart. It goes against everything my mentors have taught me, and my own instincts. I concede the usefulness of wine scores. When I am judging hundreds of similar wines (same broad origin, same vintage) in concentrated succession, scores help with the necessarily rapid recalibration of relative quality, and when I get back home and have hundreds of notes to make sense of, they can also help to identify quickly the star-performing commune. I also empathise with the consumer’s liking for wine scores. That unequivocal number crosses language barriers and inspires confidence: a definitive and concise judgment in a wine landscape of bewildering ch...