Pity the task of the wine scorer

It’s no secret that many wine writers and wine makers can’t abide the idea of giving points to wines. ‘How can such a complex and emotive thing as wine be reduced to a single number?’ is often asked to those of us who regularly attempt to rate wines with scores. It’s also no secret that I don’t subscribe to that view, since I’m of the opinion that a score is an essential component of a description, if perhaps not the be-all and end-all of one. A critic’s job is to criticise and to rate or rank. How anybody can rank wines in quality without allocating scores is just not possible. But how reliable is a score and for how long should that score apply?

Before I begin, I think it’s crucial to say that a score only provides a limited amount of information – a snapshot of nothing other than sheer quality in the mind of whoever is allocating the scores. Scores don’t talk about expression, character, flavour, or consistency of style. They’re very valuable when making a buying or serving decision – no argument about that whatsoever – but are just one component, if indeed a key one, of wine communication.

Unlike a tasting note, which is comparable to a snapshot of a wine’s expression and character at any given time in its development, a score should be an assessment of quality that remains relatively constant throughout a wine’s progress until it declines. In an ideal world, that is. Similarly, a taster or critic should be able to assess quality for a wine well before it’s ready to drink, but will obviously find it more difficult to assess a wine that is first tasted in its decline. It’s much easier to ascertain how good a young wine might become against how good a senile old wine might once have been.

But, like a tasting note, a score can be influenced by a number of factors well beyond the control of any critic. Although there are certain aspects of wine quality which simply do not broach argument, much of the business of rating wine is an attempt to convert the subjective into the objective.

The more dedicated the taster, the more trouble undertaken to remove as many variables as possible from the tasting environment. Personally, I will not taste wine at wineries whenever possible, and prefer instead to taste in the ‘standard’ conditions of my tasting room. Writers I admire, like Huon Hooke and James Halliday, adopt a similar approach.

Wherever possible I absolutely refuse to give scores to wines I only taste in the large crystal bowls of wine glasses made so popular today by the Riedel marketing machine. Large glasses are so good to drink from they increase my marks by around one point out of twenty each time – nearly enough to take a bronze medal wine to a silver, a silver to a gold, etc – so any wine rated in them clearly has an unfair advantage over the thousands of others poured into standard ISO International Standard tasting glasses.

The sheer size of the Australian industry and the extraordinary number of wines that writers have to taste these days means it is not possible to taste every one ideally. So, like other critics, 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 particular glass is. It’s time-consuming and painstaking, but sometimes despite the amount of checking you can do, things can slip through the net.

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. 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, you just have to use the most recent score available to you.

At a recent dinner I opened two bottles of Bannockburn Chardonnay 1991. The first was remarkable for its freshness and vitality, and barely looked years old. The second was very advanced, beginning to dry out and become very savoury, yet was certainly not spoiled. Had we not seen the first wine, my table would have been perfectly forgiven for assuming the second to be representative of the entire batch – that it was a very good wine, if indeed in decline. Yet both bottles came from the same box!

The longevity and ultimate quality of some wines can be very hard to predict, especially, as often occurs with Australian wine, when they have little or no track record. Sometimes it’s only after a few years in the bottle that people get the opportunity to re-assess 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 a new wine.

Furthermore, certain faults in wine, like the presence of spoilage characters from brettanomyces yeast, can be very difficult to impossible to detect in certain young wines, yet can emerge with dire and damaging consequences down the track. Certain 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. In my own rankings I 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.

Many people have an unrealistic expectation of how consistent a taster can be, for there are simply too many variables in the allocation of marks for it to be an absolute ranking. For mine, I tend to want to know why a wine might be rated 0.6 of a mark differently to the last time. Like virtually all others in my industry, I am actually pleased 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!

To some extent, wine writers share the professional hazards of the weather forecaster – when we get it wrong, everyone certainly knows about it! But, like weather forecasting, wine assessment and forecasting is very much a science of interpretation. And no amount of science is ever going to save us when the oenological equivalent of a tropical cyclone suddenly emerges on what was supposed to be a perfectly clear and tranquil day! Please login to post comment