69 Points?!

I have previously lamented in this column that wine ratings are faulty. Published ratings abound and they are mostly baloney. Wine just doesn’t lend itself to point scores and rankings. The universe of wines is too large and too diverse for consistent and fair review. In many categories thousands of products reach the market each year. Different producers have different release schedules and different wines age at different rates. There is no hope being comprehensive. Even if all the wines to be considered could be assembled, the job of tasting them all in any reasonable comparative way would be impossible.

And what if you could somehow survive tasting thousands of samples repeatedly against each other in various comparative groupings? You would still have the problem of differing styles and taster’s prejudice. Even if you eliminate the direct prejudice against a producer by tasting the wines in groups where each individual is unidentified, you still have the problem of any given person’s preference for one style over another.

Setting aside prejudice, there are still other concerns. The order of service can greatly alter outcomes. When “blind” tastings are repeated, the outcomes vary when the order of presentation is changed. Furthermore, the same sample inserted twice will elicit different comments, and different scores, with each inclusion. This tends to be true whether the tasters are expert or neophyte. Prevailing style can alter the fairness of a judging. A light, crisp Chardonnay (an admirable style for the dinner table) may not have a chance among big, rich, buttery competition. A wine that might be independently judged elegant and well balanced, might seem too light among blockbuster high-alcohol reds. In such cases the “loudest” wines win.

Most publications disguise their inability, an inability they share with all the rest of us, to speak succinctly about the pleasures of wine by assigning scores. Being unable to explain anything about an enjoyable wine, the magazines just assign it a score, perhaps 89, perhaps 82, perhaps 100. Despite any number of arguments to the contrary this is arbitrary. No one would assume that we could rank wines by merely weighing them, or comparing them to a color chart, even though those methods would lend themselves to precise numbers systematically arrived at. We see that those bits of information don’t do much to describe the experience we might have tasting a wine. Why will so many of us accept a numerical score that represents no measurable attribute at all?

At their very best numerical scorings fail in all instances to convey anything of what is enjoyable about wine. Fine wine is a thing of culture, time, place, and people. To pretend that any reviewer has the ability to sum this up in a number is astoundingly bold. A person who believes he has this ability is delusional. A person who knows he lacks this ability but still sells his ratings is worse. He is a cheat and he trades on the hard work and earned reputations of the people who produce wines.

Recently, Wine Spectator published a list of California Cabernets with numerical ratings. This has the usual number of highly rated wines with numerical scores in the 90’s. Unfortunately some equally successful, and equally deserving, wines were omitted altogether. Furthermore, some of the finest wines ever to come our way received very poor scores indeed. These scores seem to come from one reviewer who claims to have special powers to taste what none of the rest of us can. The absurdity of this is that the magazine has previously published material explaining that its reviewer can detect damning faults that are not harmful and cannot be tasted by others. This is a very weird twist indeed. It is a strange oblique on “The Emperor’s New Clothes”. Rather than pointing out something we all see but refuse to discuss, he asserts something that no one else can observe, or of course, refute.

Remember that these numerical scores are arbitrary and in many cases assigned by a single individual with quirks and failings. These numbers tell us more about the writers than the wines.

11/04

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