The idea of applying a score, like a school or university grade, to a wine (especially a very young one) has long been a subject of controversy. Nevertheless, competition judges and industry specialists have always been expected to work to some version of a standardised system (standard at least in their professional environment).
In the 1960s and 1970s there were several different scales, some with a maximum score of seven, some out of 10, and several out of 20. You had to learn to engage with all of them, a little like converting Celsius to Fahrenheit, gallons to litres, pounds to kilograms.
In the late 1970s Robert Parker popularised a version of the 100-point system favoured by academic institutions in the US. This had an immediate appeal to consumers familiar with the concept from their college days. In the early days, before score inflation (like bracket creep) shifted thresholds by about 10%, a score of 90 or more had an impact on sales. As one retailer memorably expressed it: “Wines scoring under 90 you can’t sell, wines scoring over 90 you can’t buy.”
Over the years most consumer-facing ratings systems migrated to a version of the 100-point system, though some competitions stayed with the 20-point scale. This was easily managed, even by judges accustomed to other systems. If you have been directed to parse the wines in terms of the medals you think they deserve, you make that call first and then allocate the points in accordance with whatever scale you’ve been asked to apply. So the cut-off for a gold medal could be 17.5 or 18 or even (as in Australia) 18.5.
None of this changes the often-expressed unhappiness about allocating a score to something as aesthetically complex as a bottle of wine. However, that horse has long since bolted. Expecting the commerce of wine to flourish on something as loose as a string of adjectives, or even the broader bracketing favoured by some archaic academic institutions — such as α or β to represent a first or second class result — would be like banking on the ANC to put a stop to corruption.
But this isn’t even the beginning of the wrangling around judgment and quantification when it comes to assessing wine quality. Wading into a recent controversy about why some of the Cape’s most sought after wines received less-than-stellar scores from a UK panel, a US-based wine amateur opined that it was because the wines were tasted blind (rather than sighted), which accounted for their apparent underperformance.
He was wrong on two counts: many of the wines in question had previously scored well in blind tastings. More erroneous, however, was his assumption that judging criteria are absolute.
Of course it’s important to assess a wine “blind” — how else do you bypass the producer’s marketing message? If you know it’s a “legendary” wine, you’re predisposed to thinking more highly of it. But he’s wrong to assume that qualitative criteria are culturally neutral. Personal preference (which includes aesthetic familiarity) obviously plays a role.
Napa cabernets are more highly rated by American than French critics, and it seems safe to say that west coast consumers (at least) prefer them to their counterparts from Bordeaux. My aesthetic sensibility has been shaped by a lifetime of working with French and SA wine. When I taste a cap classique, in the back of my mind I have 40 years of sampling Champagne, rather than Prosecco, against which to frame my judgment.
It is perfectly possible to arrive at largely uncontroversial opinions about how well a wine has been made, whether it is harmonious, a true expression of the variety, subtle, finely crafted, even intricate and complex. But if you have grown up in an environment where concepts like brash and bold count for more than nuanced and detailed, what you will be looking for in a bottle of wine (or a movie or a book) may be wholly different from what others might prefer to celebrate.
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