Changing a Wine’s Score – An Insider’s View

A thick skin is an asset for any wine writer, especially for the few of us who publish thousands of scores every year. Every now and again having re-tasted a wine, I find I have not insignificantly altered the score I have given it. This is always a matter of some concern to me, since I have always followed the approach that the score I present in my books and on my website is that from my most recent tasting of any given wine.

To some people, who believe that tasting a wine is akin to dipping a piece of pH paper into a fluid, a professional taster should always arrive at pretty much the same score for each and every wine. However there is an extensive list of variables that can influence ratings and cause what many put down as discrepancies in a taster’s work. This list includes wine temperature, room temperature, the age of the wine relative to the others in the tasting, bottle condition and I’m not meaning obvious cork taint influence, the stage of development of the wine, the cellaring and transport conditions, the other wines in the tasting, the health and mood of the taster, the environment I’m always wary of rating a wine at a winery or with its maker, whether the taster is operating alone or in company, the number of wines in the tasting and the time of day.

Anyone who thinks that wine tasting is a readily repeatable and exact science that should consistently reproduce exactly the same results each time, and over a period of several years, simply doesn’t know enough about it. The challenge facing a professional taster is to be aware of and then attempt to eliminate as many of these variables as possible. And even if we do, we’re still human and prone to error. Just as I’ve witnessed many of Australia’s best wine makers slam their own wines in public and trade tastings, there’s not a wine writer I respect who wouldn’t admit to making mistakes. The problem for us is that once we make them, they’re there for anyone to see.

Because of the sheer number of wines I have to taste it is not possible to taste every single one in perfect conditions. I have no choice but to put wines in large tastings. While I take as long as possible over each wine, sometimes the impression they leave can be affected by the wines lined up just before them, or by how well ‘breathed’ or not the wine in the glass is.

Sometimes, especially with older wines, cork variation is sufficient to make a wine appear significantly older or younger than it seemed the last time it was tasted. This can happen without any suggestion of any cork taint or wine fault – it’s just part of the deal that goes with sealing wines with corks and keeping them in different cellaring conditions. Yet you can’t tell at the time that this is the case, unless you happen to have another bottle or else tasted the same wine in the recent past. As a critic, unless the sample is clearly faulty or questionable, you just have to publish the most recent assessment you have made.

Some wines can be very hard to predict, especially when they have little or no track record. Sometimes it’s only after a few years in the bottle that I get the chance to re-taste the earliest vintages of certain wines, and some change of impression is virtually inevitable. The machine has yet to be invented and the palate has yet to be born which can fully anticipate every development in new and young wine, especially from unproven labels.

It can also be very challenging to predict with accuracy the ultimate quality of a wine tasted just a short time after making or bottling, a practice I make every effort to avoid. Young wines can change in dramatic and unpredictable ways in a few months. It’s pleasing to be one of the first to review any given young wine, but from time to time you find yourself wishing you’d held your fire.

Furthermore, certain faults in wine, like the presence of extremely faint spoilage characters from influences such as brettanomyces yeast can be very difficult to detect in certain young wines, yet can emerge with dire and damaging consequences down the track. Some things can be completely impossible to predict in a very complex molecular biochemical environment such as wine.

Rating wines is really a matter of ranking them in some form of order. On my website I still use the entire decimal point to be able to distinguish more levels of quality than is done in Australian wine shows, in which people just mark to a whole point or a half-point. Yet I don’t pretend for a moment that there’s anybody on earth who would rate the same wine to the same score and decimal place each and every time the wine is tasted.

It’s obvious that many people have an entirely unrealistic expectation of how consistent any taster can be, for there are simply too many variables in the allocation of marks for it to be an absolute ranking. In my case, I want to know the reasons why I might rate a wine by an entire mark differently to the last time I tasted it. Like virtually all others in my industry, I am actually delighted when I revisit a wine after a significant period of time to discover my ranking might only be 0.3-0.6 of a mark different. Furthermore, as I have explained earlier, there are plenty of reasons why a wine might appear to be more or less developed than might have been expected from previous tastings, all of which very reasonably alters predicted cellaring times.

At the end of the day, since I re-taste around 10-15 of most of the wines in my book on a yearly basis, I am frankly pleased by the small degree of significant alteration I find myself having to do. I don’t change wine ratings lightly, and wouldn’t change a rating of a wine beyond 1.5 marks out of 20 without a pretty good reason, and without a great deal of thought. However, my job is to report my views, and if they change over time, then I’d rather deal with the adverse reaction than live with the knowledge that I had printed something that I didn’t really believe.

However, if you are one of the people anxious about a wine I have had a reason to downgrade significantly – which probably means you own some – I am happy to acknowledge your right to disagree with me. You might still enjoy the wine, which is entirely your prerogative. So drink it, and rejoice in the fact that it is still possible for people to have different views about the same wine. Otherwise, if you agree with my reassessment of a wine, sell it. And I’ll still bet you’re still ahead on the deal. Please login to post comment