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 choice.
But what do points really tell you about a wine? And how, if at all, do the different rating systems used by wine critics and the wine trade relate?
In Robert Parker’s Parker Points ™ system, marks range from 50 (‘unacceptable’) to 100 (‘extraordinary’). Whatever your views on the implications of Parker’s influence (that’s another story), it is clear that he comes at wine from the perspective of a wine lover and consumer champion, and the explanation of his 100-point system is coherent and logical: http://www.erobertparker.com/info/legend.asp.
Despite the theoretical low of 50 points, few wines reviewed by Parker score less than 80. It’s not surprising: Parker is not in the business of reviewing ‘undistinguished’ everyday plonk. In practice then, there are four main ‘grade bands’ in this 100-point system: 80-84 is ‘barely above average to good’; 85-89 is ‘very good’; 90-94 is ‘excellent’ and 95-100 is ‘outstanding’.
UK wine writer Jancis Robinson, and many UK merchants, use a 20-point score system, which has five main grade bands, once you are out of bad wine territory: 15 is ‘average but distinguished’; 16 is ‘superior’; 17, ‘a cut above superior’; 18 is ‘a humdinger’ and 19-20 is ‘truly exceptional’. The tongue in cheek casualness of these descriptions tells a tale, and Jancis Robinson has written about her unease over pinning down wine with a number.
You can see how 5 star scoring systems such as those used by Decanter magazine relate to the 100-point system. One star is ‘acceptable’; two stars denotes ‘quite good’; three stars ‘recommended’; four stars denotes ‘highly recommended’ and 5 stars gets the wine a ‘Decanter Award’, which presumably means it’s outstanding.
Masters of Wine (of whom Jancis is the most famous and influential) are trained to qualitatively assess wine and articulate its nuances. This is certainly part of my problem with giving a wine a number – it’s the antithesis of the qualified, contextual, qualitative approach. It just feels a bit lazy, or perhaps insufficiently humble, to hand down a score as a final judgment on the sensual, aesthetic, multi-layered experience that is a great wine.
But what about the tasting notes? Here’s the irony. Parker, for example, writes diligent, detailed notes on every wine. The problem is that the scores overshadow them. Even if consumers are inclined to read the notes, the temptation is for those marketing and selling the wines to emphasise the score. We feed the monster, and then fret as it grows.
A score gives an impression of decisive, definitive, objectivity. A number carries the weight of scientific analysis. And this, I think, is my big problem with scores. A score is simply a concise, numerical expression of ‘how good’ that taster found that wine on that occasion. Outstanding? Good? Average? The joy of wine is in the exchange of experience and opinion. Numbers shut that interaction down, and they do so through a sort of pseudo-scientific intimidation. I would personally prefer, as the renowned MW Clive Coates has done for years, to use the literary equivalent of these judgments: if you think it’s Outstanding – say so. You don’t need a number 20 to do that for you.
And finally, wine scores distract us from the great problem and opportunity for wine criticism: the role of personal preference in judging wine.
My colleagues at BWI, passionate wine lovers all, are far less tortured by all this than I. Their observation is that clients ask about the scores and find them valuable, whether they are deciding on wines for drinking or to invest in.
What do you think? How much credence do you put in scores? And should we keep awarding them, even to wines in their infancy?
Good article! Aren't scores the inevitable result of the industry's failure to explain wine to consumers in a simple, appealing way? Busy people don't want to have to study at WSET before they buy, they want to find out whether a wine is going to be any good, and get on with life...
ReplyDeleteBeautifully written piece, and I think you're absolutely right about this.
ReplyDeleteFrom a drinkers' perspective, a lot of the fun I've had is finding just how good off vintages are that may have a notionally low score but still have so much to say. From a scoring perspective, if 2005 Haut Brion is going to be 19 or 20pts, or a Brodbent 5 stars, then the 1993 or 1997 are going to have to be well short of that if the 19pts or 5 stars are still going to mean anything. But what a pleasurable wine can still emerge from a great winemaker in even a lesser vintage!
I would love to see more critics take up the challenge of using the Clive Coates system. Not least as the scoring system could face a possible crisis of confidence issue if we start to see a succession of great Bdx vinages - where do you go if one has given the 2009 and 2010 20 pts, and 2011 or 2012 are also cracking? (Of course like Spinal Tap's amps you could go to 11).
Unfortunately, I think the reality of the current market means that for critics it's a bit like tasting Bdx en primeur so early - you're damned if you do and damned if you don't.
In the end, intelligent wine readers and drinkers will realise that the score is only the start of the picture. The end of the picture - and the great pleasure of this whether you're a collector or enthusiastic drinker - is to try them yourself and make up your own mind, after the critics have brought them to your attention.
I think Jackson makes a very valid point when he says "the score is only the start of the picture". Ultimately a score is a point in time evaluation, and wines are not static - particularly at the top end, they evolve and change, probably more rapidly and unpredictably than even Robert Parker can keep up with them.
ReplyDeleteA good example is the 1997 Pichon Longueville Baron that we were lucky enough to uncork a few weeks ago (http://is.gd/pichon). This has a parker score of only 86, but that in no way expresses the sheer pleasure that this wine gave us - it's barely into the "very good" banding of his scoring system, so would equate to a 2-3 star wine in decanter I suppose.
The other point is that one person's vinegar is another's nectar. If you love big, blowsy new world cabernets, you might not be entranced by a lean, elegant left-bank claret. There's no scoring system in the world that can express personal taste - so perhaps it's better to rate wines according to a few fundamentals, eg: body, elegance, balance, "fruitiness". Then people can make their own decisions about whether they'll actually like what's in the bottle.