Scoring wines

Wine drinkers are, happily, presented with more choice than ever before. Unhappily, we all seem to have less and less time to make decisions. A score which can be interpreted at a glance is one obvious way of solving those two problems and it was perhaps understandable that in the late 20th century many wine consumers and, particularly, retailers leaned heavily on scores as a means of buying and selling wine respectively. Some of the various scoring systems and their wider context are discussed in numbers and wine. The prototype is that used by the American writer Robert parker, who did much to promote the controversial but highly influential practice of awarding points out of 100 between 50 and 100, modelled on the American high school system. Effectively, wines of interest to readers of his and the many other wine writers who adopted a similar scoring system are those which score more than 85. Serious collectors and investors tend to concentrate on those which score more than 90, or even 95, so-called trophy wines. Other tasters use other scales, often in Europe points out of 20, but the 100-point scale is more popular with retailers.