numbers and wine, a combination that has assumed increasing importance as winemaking has become more scientific, and as consumers, faced with a bewildering choice of wines, seek easily appreciated assessments of wine quality such as scores. As recently as the 1970s, winemakers had only the vaguest grasp of their wines’ vital statistics; and the only numbers of significance to most wine drinkers were those of vintage, price, and, among more sophisticated connoisseurs of bordeaux, the numerical rankings associated with wine classification.
