Credit score rating system

Settling the score: wine writers rate the 100-point system

On a scale of 1 to 100, how would you rank the effectiveness of the 100-point rating system? Advocates might say it's "elegant and essential, with hints of charming imperfection," while detractors might describe it as "overpowering and overblown, with elitist undertones." Whether the 100-point scale merits a 95 or a 59, few can deny that wine consumers want to see scores. And as long as the public wants them, critics will be doling them out in the form of points, stars, puffs or X-ratings.

At this year's World Wine Market in San Francisco, rating systems were scrutinized by a group of leading wine writers and experts who came together for a panel discussion on "the rating game." Panelists included Charles Olken of the Connoisseurs' Guide to California Wine, Gerald Boyd of the San Francisco Chronicle, Josh Greene of Wine & Spirits and Peter Granoff, MS, formerly of Virtual Vineyards. Jeff Morgan of Wine Enthusiast moderated the discussion.

Though all of the panelists stressed the importance of words over numbers, most agreed that wine ratings are a necessary evil.

"At Wine & Spirits, we spent a lot of time discussing this problem," Greene said. "We're faced with a market that wants ratings and wants to know what we think about the wines. It really comes down to what our role is in this market as critics. We believe that the only reason (consumer) wine magazines exist in this market is to help people decide about wines they want to buy and sort through a lot of the market in advance."

The most effective way to fulfill that purpose, according to Greene, is to rate wines using the 100-point scale--though the task is not always easy. "When we're tasting the wines using the 100-point scale, we have to be very conscious," he said. "It hurts our brains to sit there and work that way. We've also talked about the fact that the scale has basically come down to 80 to 100 points. People don't want to know about wines (that score) under 80 points."

To get around this problem, Greene said that he had to come up with alternative ratings for wines that score below the 80-point level. "In order to talk about those wines we had to find other ways of recommending them," he said. "So we have created value ratings, we've created issues where we just talk about value and leave points out of it, we've created issues where we talked about character and we didn't have any ratings in that issue at all. It's a struggle to do that, because it's not what the retailers want, and it's not necessarily what the readers want. So I think we're stuck with (the 100-point scale), no matter what we want to do as critics. Even with all its flaws, it's something that most people in this country understand."

Of the writers on the panel, all but Boyd use the 100-point system to rate wines for their respective publications. According to Boyd, who uses a star system at the Chronicle, it's important that people read the reviews rather than focusing on scores.

"The rating game itself has gotten to the point where the game has become more important than the wine," Boyd said. "I am not in favor of the 100-point scale, but let me take it from the standpoint of the Chronicle's system. My feeling is that wine should either be recommended or not recommended. I think it's really as simple as that. There's a lot of variance between the systems and when consumers try to sort all that out it gets to be confusing. But if you're really interested in wine and you follow the ratings, I think you tend to find somebody that agrees with what you think. I like to tell people to read all they can, look at the ratings and so-forth, then go buy the wine and decide for (themselves). Don't pay any attention to the ratings--they're a good guideline, but please don't encourage people you work with to use them as the end-all."

Olken said that although he shares Boyd's dislike of the 100-point scale, he recently began using it for Connoisseurs' Guide in addition to stars (or "puffs," as many in the industry call them).

"We've been publishing for 28 years now, and a couple years ago we concluded that we were being left behind by the 100-point system," Olken said. "It got to the point where very few stores would say, 'three puffs in Connoisseurs' Guide,' because no one knew what that meant. So today we use both the three-star system and the 100-point system."

Though the 100-point scale has its faults, Olken said, it's "the currency that wineries are using" and it's less confusing for consumers. "Any ratings system is a shortcut," he said. "It's simply a way of communicating in some symbolic notations about how a reviewer feels about a given wine. The thing that really differentiates wines, as far as I'm concerned, is the review. You have to read the review. We're all in this business because we love the product, and the love of the product is not found in the numbers, or the stars or the puffs--it's found in the words. Points are only part of it."

Granoff, who weighed in from a wine merchant's perspective, acknowledged that critics play an important role in an overcrowded wine market, though he disagreed with Olken and the other panelists on several counts.

"My biggest beef is with the 100-point system itself," he said. "As a professional taster with years of experience, I do not believe in the artificial precision that a 100-point system communicates. One of the biggest frustrations (I have) with the system is lack of context. I have had delicious wines that barely squeaked by at 80 points, in a lovely setting, with the right friends and family and the right meal, and no wine could have pleased me more. The system as it's set up is really artificial--when you're lining wines up and tasting them against each other, it's the loudest wine at the party that gets the attention. And I think that's a disservice to many of the world's most interesting wines.

"Everybody says, to their credit, in the fine print, 'please read the descriptions.' The reality is that's not what is happening in the marketplace. (People) don't care about the description-it's not even being posted on the retail shelves. And if you have a product out in the marketplace and it's not being used properly, don't you have a responsibility to rethink it, to change it?"

During the Q&A session that followed the discussion, a wine retailer asked the panel to address another issue: the alleged "glass ceiling" that prevents certain varietals from receiving top scores.

"Because of the way Parker and Spectator use the 100-point scale, there has been attributed to it this Chardonnay- and Cabernet-centric aspect to the scale, but it's not necessarily endemic to using (it)," Greene responded. "You can use the 100-point scale and spread it across a wide range of styles. We try to treat every category equally."

Boyd, however, pointed out that not all wine critics share Greene's sense of fairness. "Anyone who has served as a judge on any wine competition knows that there are judges out there who will not give a gold medal to certain types of wine," Boyd said. "Some of these people won't admit it and others will admit it openly. That's wine snobbism and it exists at many different levels in the business today."

One by-product of this snobbery, a winery owner in the audience lamented, is that many consumers are only interested in buying wines that have scored 90 points or more in a major publication.

"It's easier to sell a wine when it gets a 90+, no question about it," Morgan said. "but a lot of wineries are selling a whole lot of wine without getting 90s. You can't say, 'I got an 88 from Robert Parker'--you have to use another tactic."

Granoff agreed, adding that wineries that use scores to market their products "forfeit the right to complain" when they don't get the ratings they want. "I think it's a little unfair to hold the publications solely accountable for (the consumer obsession with scores)," he added. "All of us in the supply chain have created this monster."

And, by the looks of it, it's a "monster" we're all going to have to learn to live with.