Last year, my very first post here was a takedown of the 100 point wine rating system as employed by mainstream wine writers. It was written in the form of an explanation of its inherent worthlessness and irrelevance in the contemporary wine market coupled with an assertion of the net harm that its use causes in this market.
In the ensuing months, my opinion hasn't changed but I thought the debate was worth another look because of a couple of somewhat recent high profile defenses of the system from writers whose work I otherwise admire, including San Francisco Chronicle Wine Editor Jon Bonné and freelance writer and Wine Enthusiast West Coast Editor Steve Heimoff. Both of these men I consider among the most thoughtful and cosmopolitan journalists writing about wine today, so it was discouraging to see their defenses of the system utilizing those same tired arguments used by lesser critics.
I'll save the point for point rehashing of their respective arguments, as there's far too much writing about other writers' writing going on in the wine blogs these days. Instead, I'd like to quickly address the fundamental fallacies which most of these "defenses" share. I encourage readers here to explore the links above and come to their own conclusions on the matter.
And fundamentally, the quantitative rating of wine damages the effort to broaden consumers' palates and hampers the introduction of a broader range of wines from all over the world into the American wine market. It reduces wine discourse to numbers and stars and pits wines from certain parts of the world, particularly those that were not established in America when Wine Advocate and Wine Spectator began issuing scores, against others. And so far, nobody has come up with a credible argument in favor of quantitative rating (of which the 100 point system is most prevalent and influential) being in any way superior to a clearly subjective system of narrative criticism. The arguments in support all eventually devolve into some form of "well, we like it" or "it's just what we use."
Thankfully, we've seen a drastic decrease in the influence of point scores from major publications on wine sales, a trend that should continue as more and more new wine drinkers see the wine rating system in particular and the magazines and writers employing it in general as increasingly out of touch, that its use is indicative of a way of thinking about wine that is outmoded.
And isn't that the best argument against its use? If you want to be a wine critic who remains relevant for the next thirty years you might want to ditch the rating system now, lest you be stuck wearing the wine writing equivalent of acid-washed jeans and feathered hair a decade too late.
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However, if you use scores even as a partial guide to your buying you are eliminating a giant swath of wines that you might otherwise enjoy simply because they have never been scored by a major publication.
Wine Spectator says it only reviews wines that are widely available, Wine & Spirits will only review wines that are distributed in at least a couple dozen states. While they have legitimate commercial interests for doing this as a national publication, it does little to help a buyer in, say, California, where the average wine shop could literally have hundreds of wines that are never reviewed simply because they aren't sold outside the state.
What do you specifically learn from the rating (as opposed to the tasting notes) that helps you make your decision? All things being equal, will you always buy the higher-rated wine, even if it's only a point or two? Not a rhetorical question, I'm legitimately curious.
What's wrong with a reviewer's narrative tasting notes? Why do you need a number (or letter, or whatever) attached to it? One person's number literally tells you nothing.