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The popular 100-point scale is used to rate every
wine that is reported here
with
at least a brief description accompanying it. The breakdown:
100 (20) Ethereal Perfection.
Heaven. (Haven't experienced this yet)
97-99 (18-19) Very Great. Classic Plus.
More than perfect.
95-96 (17-18) Great. Classic.
Textbook Perfect.
90-94 (15-16) Outstanding. Excellent. Serious
Stuff.
87-89 (13-14) Very Good. Well put together.
84-86 (11-12) Good to very good with flaws.
80-83 (9-10)
Pleasant to Good "table wine". Nothing serious.
79 and below Barely drinkable to horrid
+ better than the score implies, either due to potential or sheer charm
No surprises here. This is the scale
used by most wine publications
and critics. It doesn't exactly follow
the A, B, C, ... grading system
we got in school, since a C (70-79)
is essentially an F. I guess wine
critics are all overacheivers, or
have overinflated images of themselves.
20-point scale equivalents are given
in parentheses.
The great thing about the 100-point scale is that it condenses everything you
think and feel about a wine into
a single number. Of course, this is also the
bad thing about it, which is why
descriptions of the taster's impressions
always accompany the scores. These
impressions are very subjective, which is
why most tasters, including me, think
that a score is required for clarification.
But even with the score, I often
find it difficult to translate the impressions
of the taster into a coherent picture
of what the wine actual tastes like. This
is the inspiration for the 20-point
scale, whose purpose in life is to give a
blow-by-blow description of a wine
in a more objective format. This is acheived
by deriving an overall score from
the sum of the scores from five categories.
This sounds intricate and painful,
but it's actual not, since the five categories
relate what your senses are experiencing
in the order in which you experience
them.
20-Point Scale
You see the wine (the Color)
You
smell it (the Bouquet)
You taste it (the Flavor)
You taste it again after it's gone
down (the Finish).
Oops, that's only four, I saved the
most abstract category for last,
Body,
the texture and structure of the wine (mouthfeel, size, balance, etc.)
Each category receives 0-4
points as follows
0 Poor
1 Just passable.
2 Good.
2.5 Very Good
3 Excellent
3.5 Outstanding
4 Perfect
The 20-point scale is nothing new. It has been
traditionally used by wine
nuts for generations, so it
actual predates the 100-point scale by a long shot.
Some tasters use it in a similar
fashion to the 100-point scale, just giving
an overall score, but I find
the 20-point scale to be more confusing unless
you know where the points are
coming from. 20-point ratings are only
given here when time permitted
and the wine inspired indepth coverage.
See above for overall conversions
between the 100-point and 20-point scales.
The philosophy behind the rating:
Scores should be used to put the overall level
of quality and desirable traits
of a wine on an
absolute scale, based on how it's drinking at the time it was
tasted. I reject
the idea that scores should take into account the taster's
estimation of a wine's
aging potential, even though I'm probably sometimes
guilty of this myself,
since no one is clairvoyant, particularly when it comes
to wine. I also
reject, even more strongly, the idea that different types of
wine should be rated
on different scales, in other words, a Beaujolais should
be rated on a less
critical scale than a Bordeaux. This defeats the purpose
of a rating system
and gives the reader a false impression of how a wine
stacks up in the
general scheme of things. The score should reflect a wine's
level of perfection,
not how well it stacks up to its peers, i.e. no bell curves
please. In a similar
vain, I also try not to get too hung up on wines being true
to form, appellation,
etc. If I found a Chambertin that drank like a very great
Latour, I would
not subscribe to marking it down because it didn't taste like a
Burgundy.
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