Rate Me, My Friend

RP95.  WS88.  BH91.  IWC91-94(?).

Almost every wine that is made is rated.  Hundreds of critics dole judgments on the quality of thousands of wines at a daily rate.  There are professionals and amateurs, the biased and naive.  Wine becomes increasingly unobtainable with high ratings, and seldom gets cheaper when it falls short.  And as ratings try to capture the overall intent of the wine, they will seldom correlate to your personal experience.  So why does the wine world revolve around the 100 point scale?

I like ratings.  There, I said it.  Maybe I'm too young to have turned jaded against the industry.  And yes, this admission probably knocks me down a peg or two with the truest wine geeks and expert tasters.  What does that say about me?  Well, firstly, I know what I like.  That is one of the greatest challenges to anybody trying to get into wine.  The next hurdle is being comfortable about your preferences around the purists, egos, modernists, and antagonists in the business.  A necessary step to stand among the professionals is to take a stand in the first place.  And if I respect the taster or critic, then I want to know what they think.  At the core of the entire rating system, 100-points or scrawled notes on a napkin, is my personal connection and corollary experience with any given taster.

To break it down, let me draw together two of the most influential Italian Wine critics, Mr. Antonio Galloni (Robert Parker's Wine Advocate) and Mr. James Suckling (Wine Spectator).  The common argument against Wine Spectator and for Wine Advocate is that the former is a commercial publication and therefore is more easily influenced (wink, wink) than the latter.  Knowing that, and taking all my grains of salt, I have had more great tasting experiences that have been from purchases based on ratings issued by Mr. Suckling of Wine Spectator.  Therefore, the Italian wine ratings from Wine Spectator, while Mr. Suckling is on the beat, are the most valuable reference for me when I have not tried a wine.  The ratings are not the best, just the best for me right now.

So, if we know how to value ratings, then what are they used for?  Generating excitement and jacking up prices, for one thing.  However, if you consider a wine enthusiast who knows how to judge base quality of a wine by pedigree of producer, vintage, and location, then that person has either to find a reference on any given wine or taste it.  And in a world of limited supply, you seldom have the chance to wait to taste a wine and be passive because it will run out.  Therefore, consider it insurance on investments on wine that you have to buy on spec.

The other thing that ratings are good for is consensus.  Every once in a while there are critics from many different publications that end up agreeing.  I see this as a basic level of quality that can be largely trusted.

But again, it is all about the overall experience of a wine that can be different from bottle to bottle, day to day, and evolve with every minute.  Drink a wine too fast and it is a 91.  Let it decant for 6 hours and it is a 94.  Spend a day with the wine and it can squeak out a 97.  Or possibly it all goes downhill once the cork comes out.  Find it corked or oxidized and there was no reason for it to have a rating attached to it at all.

Regardless, while gaining a general evaluation of a wine is a good place to start, finding out what you like is much better.  It is incredibly valuable to a novice or expert to use some system to track their wine experiences.  Anywhere from a notebook to a journal (or perhaps, a blog) works well.  A great resource that I've found is CellarTracker.com where you can find millions of amateur posts, usually at least dozens on almost any individual wine.  This sample size helps hone in so many experiences of so many bottles in so many environments from so many people of so many backgrounds.  That, to me, is the toughest and best critic of them all.

P.S. If you'd like to check out a few of my ratings and reviews on CellarTracker, you can find them here.