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Wine Ratings: A Good Thing or a Bad Thing?
By David Rosengarten
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Back in the Dark Ages of wine--about 1975 or so--journalistic accounts of new wines depended solely on words. Those things made up of letters. Writers may have told you in Burgundy prose if they liked a wine, or disliked it--but it never would have occurred to them to transform their subjective opinions into something so seemingly objective as a number. A score. A rating. This was wine, after all--which had the color of Homer's sea, and according to Keats, the aroma of the warm South. Numbers? Let the accountants and the rocket scientists write down numbers.
But, shortly thereafter, a funny thing happened on the way to the wine
shop--a path theretofore taken by only a tiny number of Americans, a small, out-of-the-mainstream cult who most likely grew up with the stuff in the garages of their ethnic families. Suddenly, wine was cool. And, just as suddenly, a whole new group of Americans felt that they had to be reasonably conversant with this ancient beverage. They had to serve it at dinner parties. They had to order it in restaurants--on dates!--and at business dinners. They might even find themselves in conversations with certified wine geeks, during which they might have to indicate whether the 1982 Chateau Ducru-Beaucaillou or the 1982 Chateau Palmer was more dynamite. (I have no idea what "dynamite" means as a wine descriptor, but the word operates as some kind of signal to wine geeks that you're a member of the club.)
And there's the problem: How on earth do you find out which of the scads of wines coming into the market every year are dynamite?
Times of crisis cry out for men of vision, and in the early 1980s one
man--one lonely pioneer of wine journalism--strode to the stage and provided a solution for thousands. Robert Parker, Maryland attorney and fledgling wine writer, decided to affix a point score to every wine he judged. Some had done that before--particularly at the University of California at Davis--but Parker came up with a new kind of wine score. Reasoning that every red-blooded American went to a school where 65 on a test was a passing grade, 80 was a big relief, and 90-plus meant your parents might buy you stuff, Parker instituted the 100-point scale. If he gave a wine a 61, everyone knew in a moment what that meant. If he gave a wine a 98, everyone felt in their hearts what that meant--and, accordingly, everyone ran out to buy that stuff for themselves.
Lots of other wine writers and wine publications immediately decried this trivialization of wine, this transmogrification of an aesthetic entity into a quantifiable commodity.
Within two years they were all using the 100-point scale.
Today, in the early 21st century, the 100-point scale is a huge fact of life in the wine world. Every major publication employs it, most wine drinkers pay lots of attention to it, and most advertising and marketing campaigns are built on the number that Parker or "The Wine Spectator" dreamed up for a given wine. I've spoken to merchants who tell me that some of their most loyal customers--people to whom they've been recommending wine for years, with great success--walk into their shops and ask for such-and-such wine rated 92 by Parker. "Oh, that's very good," the merchant might say. "But I've got a similar wine that's better, costs less, and I know it's to your taste." Then they watch with horror as the customer looks up the wine in Parker, ascertains that it received an 89, and says "I'll go with the 92."
Are you one of them? Or, perhaps, are you wondering if you should become one of them? Are wine ratings a good thing for the consumer? Are wine ratings good for you?
The first thing you must realize about wine ratings is that it's virtually impossible to rate wine on a 100-point scale. Try it. Line up ten different wines, taste them, and give them numbers. Somewhere between the second and third wine, as you start saying "Geez, is this a 79? An 84? An 88?", you'll realize that today it might be a 79 and tomorrow it might be an 88. Whole blocks of numbers--like the 70s, the 80s, the 90s--might make some kind of broad sense, but fine-tuning it to 83 or 84 is nuts. In other words, I can live with a ten-point scale but I'll never understand the passion with which consumers follow the 100-point scale.
And there's another problem. Some writers--such as the Scaleman himself, Robert Parker--are rather remarkably consistent in their judgments. That's good, because when Parker rates a wine in the 70s, or the 90s, I have some sense of what that means. Unfortunately, other individuals are not as consistent in their ratings. Worse, some of our most influential wine publications give you ratings from different tasters--sometimes identified with the taster's name, sometimes not! And sometimes their ratings for a single wine are done by committee--an average of ratings given to a bottle by a group of people. That's nuts! That tells me nothing! A number objectifies a taster's preferences, and enables me to compare the number against that taster's other numbers--but if I don't know who the taster is, and what he stands for, what
good is it?
The biggest problem of all, however, in the professional ratings game, is what most of these tasters have come to stand for.
Consider this: A wine is like a painting. Sometimes you like a painting because its realistic technique is staggering. Sometimes it's not realistic at all, but provides a conceptual jolt. Sometimes, in portraiture, it offers a glimpse into someone's soul. Sometimes a design, an arrangement of colors and shapes, may be totally abstract but tugs at your heartstrings as music does. Sometimes you may love a painting and have no idea why. Art critics never offer "scores" for paintings, because they know they can't be compared in this way.
The modern wine critic, unfortunately, has to, in most cases, offer scores. And the only way to do that is to take wine down to a common denonimator, to look for the same qualities, over and over again, that make it apparent what a "high-score" wine tastes like. And there couldn't be, of course, anything subtle about the criteria that the wine writers have chosen. For whites, it's massive fruit, oak (with resulting vanilla and spice), weight, lushness, alcohol. For reds, it's massive fruit, oak, weight, lushness, alcohol, tannin. What about that lively little Muscadet that gives so much pleasure? What about that silly Beaujolais that most people would much rather drink than a 99-point California Cab? What about that ethereally light but haunting old red Rioja? Lower scores for all of them, I'm afraid. They don't fit the model. Forget the fact that they may be more delicious than the big guys. Definitely forget the fact that they may be a whole lot easier to match with food--and that some foods positively demand them. The model can't accommodate these wines. They'll take an 81 and they'll be happy with it.
I say if your palate is a kind of scale, and if pouring heavy wine on it makes the number on the scale climb and that makes you happy, by all means pay attention to the ratings. But I've got a better plan. Find yourself some writers who appreciate each wine for what it is, idiosyncratically, and understand what each wine might do for you at the table. Read their words. Love wine for its variety, not for its sameness. There are only ten numerals--but there are hundreds of thousands of wines. In numero veritas? I don't think so.
The Real-World Wine Guide Table of Contents
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