Wine grading
It's not constructive to limit the range of values for grading wine. By Michael Fridjhon.
The question of wine ratings is a perennial subject in wine magazines – and occasionally in the mainstream press. Sometimes the lament is about method, or else it’s about “anomalies.” The tone ranges from hurt to outrage, but the subtext is always the same: “He/she/we wuz robbed.”
Most intelligent people realise that in matters of aesthetics – wine quality, food quality, art (Tretchikoff versus Picasso versus Damien Hirst versus Michelangelo) – there are preferences rather than absolutes. And no system of judging – however well tried and tested – is without faults, even given the limitations implicit in the whole business of rating taste quality.
Should members of the judging panel discuss their scores? The Office Internationale du Vin (OIV), whose rules are applied at many shows, believes no. Having judged OIV competitions in Europe and South America, I’m sufficiently convinced that this is a methodological error that I’ve turned down invitations to judge at its biggest party, the Concours Mondial of Brussels. Statisticians and score-keepers have their own – often legitimate – concerns. In the end, the value of any rating system – whether it is a competition, an airline selection or a wine guide – is how seriously the punters take it. I don’t much believe in Wine Spectator’s 100 point system – where very little under 90 is deemed desirable. The USA publication may just as well flag the wines “Buy” or “Don’t Buy” and leave it at that. But Mr Shanken’s flagship wine publication is a ratings bible for its many thousands of readers. They obviously like what they get.
There is always an intrinsic tension between the judging panels, and those whose wines they assess. The latter are vendors, so any score less than 100 compromises a sales opportunity. But in exactly the same way as ratings agencies must be circumspect in how generously they assess the credit-worthiness of a business, reputable wine judging panels should err on the side of parsimony. Producers want the 100 point score as badly as corporates would like a AAA rating to ease their borrowing problems.
Consumers, like lenders, appreciate a little diffidence. If there were no one- and two-star wines in Platter’s, you could be forgiven for thinking that the editor (and the Cape wine industry) had an over-inflated opinion of South African wine quality. In fact, in my view there are too many four-star and higher wines in the guide.
How do you recalibrate a book that’s been around for three decades? When the scoring system for the Old Mutual Trophy Wine Show was devised some seven years ago, I took the view that even a bronze medal (score 70 – 79) had to be a meaningful measure of quality. Everywhere else a bronze (or a score of 70) was a lollipop handed out merely for entering the show.
Deon van der Walt, then owner of Paarl winery Veenwouden but now deceased, berated me when the results of the first competition were published: “A score in the 70s in the American market says the wine is junk,” he said. However, if you don’t have a system which allows for a spread of scores, you may as well have the “Buy” or “Don’t Buy” icons and get on with it. Do we want this? In principle, this is what those whose wines are rated think they would like. That is, until their vinous gems don’t make the cut. After which, any score which saves them from commercial perdition has useful – but transient – value.
Michael Fridjhon is a leading wine writer and consultant with extensive international judging experience.
