We all grew up with scores in school.  An 89 on your science quiz, a 91 on your essay.  So the idea of rating wines via numbers was not a stretch for most people.  Granted there will be the argument that numeric scores are reflective more of historic or mathematical concerns.  Who was the first President of the U.S.? There is a right answer and a not right answer.  Square root of 64?  Same thing.  But wine is subjective.  True, but so were your English papers to a point.  The fact that the point system is something of a common experience for people makes the numerical message easier to understand.

When we started out in the business in the 1980s, everybody in wine was using the Davis scale, a 20-point review that focused primarily on technical aspects of a wine but allowed for a few style points.  It was fine for the time and is still used in a lot of wine judging.  But it was unfamiliar to people outside of the business and it didn’t really convey a shorthand message of quality to a wide swath of the populace.  So when Robert Parker introduced the 100-point scale (really a 50 point scale as each wine begins with a base of 50pts to begin with), which was picked up by Wine Spectator soon thereafter, the message resonated with most people.  It was familiar.

We could get into a whole discussion about the significance of one point (89 points vs. 90 points), and the whole ‘trying to put a numeric value on a subjective opinion’ thing.  But we are confident you have heard that all before at one point or another.  We could then babble on at length about how reviewers’ scores became inflated because bigger scores ‘sold papers’ and then got dialed back because publications felt they might lose credibility if they handed out too many big reviews.  It could be proffered now that some writers are dishing out higher scores to get attention from the trade for their publications.  After all, guys selling wine will quote a guy handing out a 95 point score to help their cause.

If a writer honestly thinks, as a writer, that giving an 89 is a good score, that’s great so long as that writer is consistent.  But no one is going to quote you because the market is not going to be impressed.  In the jaded aftermath of the ‘score’ era,  a ‘92’, doesn’t really ‘move the needle’ for most buyers unless the wine in question is inexpensive.  The point we make here is that, no matter how you spin it, it’s an undeniable fact that the 100 point scale has been the most followed wine rating system of all time and has fundamentally changed aspects of wine marketing.  The U.S. will use Celsius before the wine world gives up on the 100-point comparative.

People ask us how we score things.  If we gave scores (we think it is nonsense for a retailer to do that), we’d be the ‘tough guys’ that think ‘88’ is a good score from us and a wine that we’d drink.    Robert Parker passed out more 100s in his last issue than we have in our whole lives.  But it’s all relative to what one’s own standards are and unless someone knows us and our tastes specifically, they’re always going to go for the healthier score.  Our mission today, however is more about perspective.  The ‘numbers’ have become more important than any other measure of a wine’s quality, including the description.  They in fact exist not only in and of themselves, but forever.  They never die!

A family ‘tragedy’ brought it all home one holiday season (no, not a real tragedy).  My sister-in-law has a doctorate, was a school teacher and ultimately a superintendent.   But she fully admits she knows nothing about wine, though she occasionally tries to step out.  Given her educational background, she was very familiar with the 100 point scale.  She saw a modestly priced wine in a big box store that had a sign on it that boasted a 90 point rating.  She grabbed a couple bottles figuring she could serve them to her pain-in-the-butt brother-in-law and he might be suitably impressed.

She announced this wine’s ‘grade’ as she opened it and we tried it.  I asked who had given this wine 90 points.  None of the names of critics would really mean anything to her anyway.  But she said she didn’t remember the ‘who’.   That’s fine, she knows a lot about other things, and the wine simply wasn’t very good.  But the point was that the 90 point score, from whoever it was, gave her confidence in the purchase.  We have had many discussions about how a wine’s  scores sometimes transcends common sense and stands alone as the key determinant of a wine’s desirability.  But here was someone who is not necessarily wrapped up in the whole wine thing at all and this naked number spoke to her.

We’ll make a brief point here about something we have been seeing far too much of lately.  We’ll call it ‘score spewing’ where someone presents us a wine for sale and, during the process, spits out a number that the wine has been given from some critic. Sometimes they will even say that it was from Spectator or Advocate.  Being the cynical types, we always question what we are told and look up the score ourselves.  Hey sometimes we miss one.  Wine Spectator’s ‘Advance’ issue and some of the Hedonist’s Gazette pieces on the Advocate site aren’t that easy to search quickly.  But far too often we found out that the wine did not get a score from who we were told, but rather a different, lesser reviewer.  Sometimes it was on the previous vintage.  And sometimes it was a complete fabrication.

Venders, wineries, even some other retailers are throwing simple numbers around with impunity, without regard to whether they are accurate.  They often just issue a score without even attempting to support the research.  There is one e-retailer in particular who has a habit of tossing a score in the title like, “a 93 point Rhone at half price.”  On several occasions we were unable to find any place in the article where they cite who the score came from.  For all we know it was their great aunt Matilda.

Are they presuming people wouldn’t look?  Do suppliers think we are going to keep the wine if we find out they lied about the score, even if we liked it (OK, maybe if we really, really, really liked it)? This is a despicable practice that some purveyors don’t seem to think is any big deal.  Sure, anybody can make a mistake.  But after a couple such incidents you have to wonder if they are just tossing it out to see if it sticks.

Our real point today is about the nature of the number.  Wines are living things.  They evolve, they change, they develop.  We’re pretty good at separating the wheat from the chaff as we taste through legions of wines.  So are some of the critics.  But we are people.  Sometimes, on a day we didn’t get enough sleep, or it’s a down cycle on the biodynamic calendar, a wine that might be ‘above the line’ on another day, isn’t on that day.  We don’t really score wine per se.  Our system is binary.  If something is worth buying, for any of a number of reasons be it value, greatness, uniqueness, it’s a ‘1’.  If it doesn’t make the cut, it’s a ‘0’ and you won’t hear about it from us at all.

With the critic, particularly with publications and search engines, etc., reviews can be retrieved almost instantaneously. So let’s illustrate with an example to make our point. Let’s look at the 2012 Arcudi Cabernet Sauvignon which was reviewed by the Wine Advocate and published in Issue #222, Dec. 2015.  The notes are pleasant enough and this $150 retail Cabernet was given 87 points by Robert Parker himself.  Are we going to question the review? No.  We have disagreed with some assessments before, but have not tasted this wine. Also, that’s not the point.

The wine itself is not the issue either.  It is the process.  On that day, Parker published an 87 point review for the $150 Arcudi wine.  Don’t know where it was in the tasting order, if Bob had eaten a spicy breakfast, or if it was a ‘root day’.  All of those things, as well as a host of other variables, could have an effect on how a that wine tasted on that day or during that time period.  We only know ’87 points’.  There is a small likelihood that, if Robert Parker is still at it in a few years, and chooses to do a retrospective of the 2012 vintage, the Arcudi might get another shot.  But if the ‘ifs’ don’t come about, and more likely than not, they won’t, this is a $150, 87-point wine forever. Somebody sees this wine on a list somewhere years from now and looks it up on his phone, or watch, or personal environment goggles, they’ll see it got an 87, a score that will stimulate zero interest.

That, in essence, is the problem with wine by the numbers.  A tasting note and score is like a snapshot of a wine’s demeanor at that particular time, in that particular environment, under the auspices of that particular ‘judge’.  Think of it this way.  How would you like to be judged by a picture of you taken on a particular day, for the rest of your life?  What if it was one of those pictures taken by paparazzi whom jumped out of the bushes and surprised you?  What if that picture was taken on a day when you had a bunch of really salty food the night before and went to bed late, thus all ‘puffy’?

That is the problem with scores.  They can be forever.  That moment or moments that are chronicled are forever attached as if everything was static, and there is no ‘appeal process’.  Just like people, wine can change, for better or worse.  Or not.   But most people don’t give that a thought. It’s bad enough to toss about unsubstantiated scores for a particular wine.  But even the real reviews have to be viewed with a little perspective.  They are simply a view of a wine by a guy on a day.  The ‘guy’ may be really good at reviewing but, still, he is human and any number of things can affect people.

Could the same wine get a better review from the same guy on a different day?  Absolutely.  Will the review, whatever it is, color the wine’s acceptance by the wine elite?  Also absolutely true, and forever.   We don’t have a more infallible system right now.  But like people, there are a lot of things in motion with a wine at any particular time.  So to take that moment and make it the undisputed indicator of a wine’s worth throughout eternity seems a bit simplistic and not entirely fair.

Now you might say to yourself, ‘why is a retail store, who benefits from wine scores, being so dubious? Isn’t that hypocritical?’. Well the answer is simple. What you see from us when we send out an offer with a score, or make a recommendation with a mention of a rating, is an effort to sell you a wine whose score happens to corroborate our own opinion of that wine. The way Winex has always worked is that we buy wine we think is good first and foremost and look at scores second. When a good wine has a nice score to go with it, well, it only reinforces what we think of the wine. A win-win. However, it’s important to remember that the ‘number’ is not an absolute as people treat it.  It is merely a snapshot.