Rating at the tasting
It’s a truism that the number of wines available is so large that they confuse, even intimidate consumers — few of whom have either the time or inclination to keep track of the hundreds of new wines being launched each year.
This is where wine writers and wine competitions come into their own: by providing an “objective” rating of wines, they provide a valuable filtering mechanism — people can then exercise their own selectivity, based on price and personal preference.
There are three broad types of scales used worldwide to rate wines:
100 Point Scale: Made famous by Robert Parker and The Wine Spectator magazine, this scale essentially starts at 50 points (“unacceptable”) and moves from “below average” to “average” to where 80-84 points denote “good”, 85-89 points are “very good”, 90-94 points “excellent” or “outstanding”, and above that “extraordinary.”
Simple and easy to understand and the most widely-used scale — although its critics complain that it has led to the “Parkerisation” of wines in the past 20 years (particularly in the US) as wineries strive to produce highly-extracted (and alcoholic) “blockbusters” that score above 90 points (and hence sell for higher prices).
20 point scales: Used by Jancis Robinson (Master of Wine and an internationally-known wine authority), with anything above 15 points considered “superior”, going to “a cut above” (17 points), “a humdinger” (17.5-19 points) and “truly exceptional” (19-20 points); variations are used by the French and U C Davis (who has a famous Department of Viticulture & Oenology). I find this system somewhat confusing as it tends to deal with decimal places — and since 17.0 points is comparable to 80 on the Wine Spectator scale, the gradations thereafter are really fine!
Five-star/ four-star/ three-star scales: The best-known examples are the five-star system used by The Decanter magazine (acceptable, quite good, recommended, highly recommended, award) — although, really, one-star here corresponds to 80 points on the WS scale. The Italian publisher Gambero Rosso uses a “three glasses” system, with “two glasses” equivalent to 80-89 points.
Easy to understand — and score — but a bit simplistic, it tends to lump wines of different quality levels together under the same category.
We know that a wine is evaluated on appearance, aroma, taste/aftertaste and the overall impression. An expert will also give due weightage to typicity and complexity, and most will mention the wine’s price.
I myself use a modified version of the 100-point scale when tasting wines, alloting five points for appearance, 10 for the aroma, 20 for taste (including body and complexity), 10 for the total impression, and adding the total to a baseline of 50 to get a score out of 100.
One of the best — and highest-rated — wines that I’d tasted recently was the Brancaia IL BLU 2004, a 96-point super-Tuscan (Italy) that had extraordinary aromas of freshly cut roses with blackberry and cherry undertones, a complex full-bodied but balanced palate with velvety tannins, and a finish that just went on and on! Delicious, a tad expensive at over Rs 5,000 per bottle, but something I’d just heartily recommend for those really special occasions. Cheers! n