Wine Ratings

Rating Wines

The wine section at most Costco stores is like church. A lot of people walk by but hardly anyone goes in.

When they do, they are faced with entire walls of wines. Some of them hanging from the ceiling. Most people feel about walls of wine the way I feel about the cosmetics section of Macy’s. It is a mass of indecipherable distinctions marked with labels that sound like a quantum physics lecture.

The good folks at Costco, and pretty much every other wine store on earth, however, have your best interest in mind. They have a handy number assigned to different wines. The higher the number, the better the wine. In theory.

So, what’s that all about?

I have been known on occasion, to sit at large tables with 15 or 20 other people from the winery and taste walls of wine, some of the wines finished, some not. Many of the wines (but not all) came directly out of the barrel or the tank and were not yet ready to bottle. All tasted blind, knowing nothing about any of them.

It’s important to note that in that situation we taste for something different than what you presumably taste for. Hopefully you are tasting for a wine you like. Our goal is to decide which wines will sell. Wineries sell wine, they don’t judge them or give them numbers.

An owner of a winery doesn’t stay owner by giving wines numbers. The question is which tastes will you ( the consumer) buy and which ones will send you to the pressed meats section?

Also, we spit. We don’t swallow. Buckets or suitable containers are provided. In some cases you can spit on the ground but best to check with whoever owns the ground before you do that.

If you swallow, you will wear out your palate by number three or so and soon you won’t be able to taste anything but alcohol and sugar. Also, you’ll be too plowed to remember any of it.

Once they are bottled, then everyone on earth will tell you whether they are good or bad and give them a number. Especially, wine critics. The winery would give the highest rating to the one that sells the most or brings it the most prestige.

Our winemakers didn’t blend to their personal taste unless it was going to be bottled as their specific label. Instead they blended to the consumers’ taste, which can be determined in several ways but alas, is always changing.

The goal is rarely to sell the first bottle. There are ways to get that first bottle sold. But, if consumers don’t come back and buy it again and again, your warehouse will be full of perfectly nice bottles that will have to be closed out below cost.

Owners don’t stay owners if they sell things for less than it cost them to make. Blending for the owner’s personal taste is a good way to become a magician and make a winery disappear.

If an owner wants to blend to their own taste, they usually make small lots that are frequently pre-sold to a mailing list. It also helps if you are using grapes from a great vineyard. And it doesn’t hurt to have a great winemaker.

Rating Systems

The ultimate rating system for most of wine’s history has been price. In every country in the world the best wine has brought the highest price. Of course, best is in the taste of the beholder.

One wonders what the vintners buy one half so precious as the stuff they sell."

- Omar Khayyam, translated by Edward Fitzgerald

Price is a very rough approximation of quality in any case—one assumes a $50 bottle of cabernet is better than a $15 cabernet, but one doesn’t really know, does one? Ample scientific studies show that the $15 bottle beats out the $50 bottle more often than you would think.

The reasons for that is that there is no such thing as a “best wine” just as there is no such thing as a “best actor,”  “best Picasso,” or “best fruitcake.” People tend to think of wines as something that can be measured, rated and declared winners or losers.

That’s not at all how it works. So, rating systems are suspect from the beginning. But, just like price they give you a rough framework and the concise expression of somebody else’s opinion, e.g., “I give it an 86”.

That’s nice but what if I give it a 26?

Rating Scales

The scale we used to use in the Western World was invented in California around 1959 and it was a 1 to 20 pt scale developed by the University of Davis. This was not intended to be a consumer scale. It was meant to determine if a wine was commercially sound.

These days if you’re not getting 20 on this scale you shouldn’t be selling it.

The popular rating that shows up on your wine shelves was developed by Robert Parker, for his newsletter, The Wine Advocate. For several decades The Wine Advocate was the only newsletter that could actually cause consumers to go buy a wine he recommended.

There were lots of other people handing out numbers but they had no commercial impact for years. Wineries all over the world have actually blended wine to Robert Parker’s taste because they knew if he recommended it, people would go to the store and buy it.

Parker had a simple but brilliant thought. He based his rating system on the grades we get at school. Everyone knows what an 86 is in school or a 97 or, god help us, a 59.

In practice his scale ends up being a 20 point scale too because nothing ever gets rated below 80 that is remotely drinkable. Except for one wine I had that got a 57, but that’s another story.

The Bottle of Wine, Pablo Picasso, 1925

“As long as it is wine, it doesn’t matter which wine…”— Pablo Picasso

What Exactly are you Rating?

Traditionally you rate for balance. Balance of what?, you say. It’s a tad vague but generally stuff like alcohol, tannins, sugars, glycerin and fruit. There are very helpful diagrams that people who do this for a living use so they don’t forget what they decided.

These can be as simple as a triangle, or as complicated as you want although I don’t think a dodecahedron is very practical. Sometimes, they are even three dimensional.

Also, wines are rated for achieving (or not), the “essence of the grape or the region” which includes a traditional taste of a particular grape variety and soil mostly. This is more subtle and highly subject to interpretation.

In the most excellent drawing below, you see an illustration of the aromas and taste from the WakaWaka Wine Review (see the bottom of the drawing for attribution). I think the visual makes it simpler to understand.

All those things in the picture are what you are balancing. For instance, ‘buttery’ chardonnays are in demand but too much butter and you’ll choke on the diacetyl. Diacetyl is what makes butter taste like butter.

Notice the aromas in the drawing are from categories we’ve talked about; fruit (pineapple), vegetative (bell pepper), oak aging (toast). That’s how you do the party tricks of smelling a wine, looking up quickly and saying, “Obviously a Sauvignon Blanc”. You just smelled pineapple and bell pepper.

See? If you can taste food, you can taste wine. You’re an expert already.

See the book Does God Drink?

“Wine Country Purple” by Brazilian artist Romero Britto, https://britto.com/

Wine Spectator’s Highest Rated Wine in the World, 2020

Bodegas Marqués de Murrieta Rioja Castillo Ygay Gran Reserva Especial 2010

Score 96 Price$139 Cases made 7,500

See a video and the top 100 wines from Wine Spectator here: https://top100.winespectator.com/

Ratings can be useful in practice but they reduce art to a number. That takes the meaning and emotion out of an experience that can’t be expressed any other way except through wine.

Wine is an art like any other. It can speak to each of us individually in ways we cannot put in words. If we could, there would be no need for wine. Vodka is faster.

Current News Bonus Section:

Severe Frosts Damaging 2021 crop in French Vineyards

The French Vineyards are being severely damaged right now by excessive frost. These pots are lit to keep the vines warmer but large quantities of Chardonnay in Burgundy, and other areas are being destroyed.

That means the crop will be smaller this year which will make the wine more expensive. Unless of course, the quality also suffers. This kind of thing is why the English obsess about French weather.