Wine advice you can trust.
Uncorked: Beware "score whores" in the wine world
Ratings from outlets like Wine Spectator can help, but should be taken with a grain of salt.
"98 Points WS"
"96 Points WA"
"99 Points ST"
"Excuse me Mr. Uncorked guy, but can you please explain what all the different scores are about?"
It's hard for the average consumer to figure out what wine to buy. With tens of thousands of producers worldwide, crazy foreign labels and huge differences in vintages, how are you supposed to know what's good or what you will like?
The History of Scoring
Well, many years ago in which land no one knows for sure, some wine geeks got together and decided to come up with a rating scale, a spectrum on which to place a value on particular qualities of wine. In 1979, a guy named Robert Parker came along and was widely credited with inventing the particular rating scale of 1-100. Whether he did or not doesn't matter, but his scale up to 100 has become the unwritten abacus by which all modern wine is measured.
If a wine scores in the 90s, it sells like hotcakes. If a wine has the misfortune of being scored less than 80, it becomes the pariah of every bottle on a shelf and will likely sit there for all eternity.
Parker is hardly the only one with a rating system (although he is arguably the most consistent -- more on this later) Even more devoutly followed than Parker's publication, The Wine Advocate, is the infamous Wine Spectator. After the Spectator come many others, including Decanter Magazine, Steven Tanzer, Jancis Robinson, Gambero Rosso, Michael Broadbent ... the list goes on ad infinitum.
The rating system changed the face of retail wine purchasing forever. The average consumer, once completely dependent on deep pockets or the whim or their local wine distributor / retail / wholesaler, found empowerment in the ability to assign a value to a bottle. The buyer now has at his fingertips valuable information allowing him to get an idea of which wines are worth the money.
Get the entire article at http://onmilwaukee.com/bars/articles/winescores.html?19508
"98 Points WS"
"96 Points WA"
"99 Points ST"
"Excuse me Mr. Uncorked guy, but can you please explain what all the different scores are about?"
It's hard for the average consumer to figure out what wine to buy. With tens of thousands of producers worldwide, crazy foreign labels and huge differences in vintages, how are you supposed to know what's good or what you will like?
The History of Scoring
Well, many years ago in which land no one knows for sure, some wine geeks got together and decided to come up with a rating scale, a spectrum on which to place a value on particular qualities of wine. In 1979, a guy named Robert Parker came along and was widely credited with inventing the particular rating scale of 1-100. Whether he did or not doesn't matter, but his scale up to 100 has become the unwritten abacus by which all modern wine is measured.
If a wine scores in the 90s, it sells like hotcakes. If a wine has the misfortune of being scored less than 80, it becomes the pariah of every bottle on a shelf and will likely sit there for all eternity.
Parker is hardly the only one with a rating system (although he is arguably the most consistent -- more on this later) Even more devoutly followed than Parker's publication, The Wine Advocate, is the infamous Wine Spectator. After the Spectator come many others, including Decanter Magazine, Steven Tanzer, Jancis Robinson, Gambero Rosso, Michael Broadbent ... the list goes on ad infinitum.
The rating system changed the face of retail wine purchasing forever. The average consumer, once completely dependent on deep pockets or the whim or their local wine distributor / retail / wholesaler, found empowerment in the ability to assign a value to a bottle. The buyer now has at his fingertips valuable information allowing him to get an idea of which wines are worth the money.
Get the entire article at http://onmilwaukee.com/bars/articles/winescores.html?19508
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