The Search For A Wine Rating System That Makes Sense

These days, lots of wine critics claim that they didn’t want to score wines, but their readership couldn’t process their results without numbers and turned into beer-swilling barbarians.  The reality is that nobody takes you seriously unless you crown a winner.  Remember back in little league when the kids were too young to keep score?  Right, nobody cared.  As soon as I turned six and my mom started toting a score book, everything changed.  Playtime was over.

While my goal here is not to be taken seriously (as I’ll prove by the end of this post), I would like to start scoring wines.  There’s a certain wine retailer re-launching a certain cellar management tool in which community scores feature prominently.  I’m excited for it but if I don’t start hanging two digits on the end of my wine reviews, I’ll be back in tee-ball.  Full disclosure: I am work closely with said certain company and am heavily involved with re-launch of said certain cellar management tool [Make sure this flies with lawyers -ed].

Here are the candidate scoring systems.

100 points
Made popular by: Robert Parker, get your fill here
Scale: You would think that wines could be rated 0-100, but you would be wrong. Each wine gets 50 points just for showing up, and it goes up from there.
Pros: Lots of room to slot wines between 50 and 100.
Cons: This room is never used.  Ratings have drawn into the upper 80s and 90s to the point where rating a wine as 82 is practically a declaration of war. A published score below 90 can bring financial ruin upon a winery or retailer. Some reviewers don’t publish scores under 90. Why not just call it what it is: a ten point scale.
Verdict: Too popular and much-maligned.  I’m too elitist to roll with the crowd.

20 points
Made popular by: UC Davis and Jancis Robinson
Scale: 1 through 20
Pros: Good for people who can’t count very high.
Cons: Not precise enough for even its devotees, who often tag .5 onto the back of their score to convert it to a 40 point scale.  Wines never rated under 10, so that brings it back to a twenty point scale.  Winos just multiply by five to the the 100 point equivalent anyway, so who’s counting?
Verdict: An exercise in futility.

5 stars
Made popular by: Movie critics
Scale: 1-5 stars, with maybe a half-star thrown in
Pros: Doesn’t insult the soul of wine by implying that all wine quality can be quantified.  Refuses to take a stance on who is better: an 89 point wine on a 88 point wine
Cons:After the inevitable “ratings creep” no wine will be rated lower than three stars, leaving us with 3, 4 or 5 stars.  Stars will be trimmed down to 1/4 points, allowing for twelve ordinal slots.
Verdict: Promising, but ripe for disaster

QPR (Quality to Price)
Made popular by: Lots of people, used heavily by Food and Wine Blog
Scale: Whatever the reviewer feels like
Pros: Seeks to normalize the relationship between wine price and wine quality.  A $10 wine will be “Good” for the money, and a $250 wine will be “Bad” for the money even though the $250 bottle may taste better than the $10 bottle
Cons: Subjective.  Scale slides given the reviewer’s wallet.  No numbers.  Annoying that it isn’t called QTP.
Verdict: We want NUMBERS people.  This is AMERICA.

Short and Sweet
Made popular by: Me on my soon-to-be-made-public tasting notes on Vinfolio’s Vincellar
Scale: Awesome, Excellent, Very Good, Pretty Good, Good, Okay, Bad, Awful, A mess.
Sample note: “Pretty Good.”
Pros: Don’t have to read an entire review to find out if the wine was worthless.  No snarky flowery language to tell you about the wine.
Cons: No snarky flowery language to tell you about the wine.  Running out of English words to slot in between “Okay” and “Good.”  “Adequate” anyone?
Verdict: It works for me, but not for the general populace.

1000 points
Made popular by: Me and a colleague
Scale: 0 through 1000 (inclusive), can be takes to this tenths if more precision is needed
Pros: No longer must two wines be tied at 90, leaving intrepid point chasers scratching their heads while they decide which wine will impress their friends more. The tie can be broken, with one wine receiving a 904.5 and the other falling short at 901.9. Finally, the question can be answered: which wine is better?
Cons: None that I can see.
Verdict: Winner winner chicken dinner.  It’s settled!  Starting now I’m going to start rating wines on the 1000 point scale.  Prepare for the MD/VA wine review revolution.

Image is a CC licensed photo of a highly rated wine from Flickr user thomashawk