Do Wine Ratings Make Sense?

(WSJ) - First, a confession: I’m a sucker for wine ratings.

I marvel at how they take a subject so complex and distill it into a series of numerical values. Who cares if a wine is aged in French oak or if it has a nose of pencil shavings and stewed figs? Just tell me if it merits a 90-or-above rating.

As it turns out, Wine Spectator, the magazine whose ratings are the go-to source for many wine aficionados, throws an annual three-day bash largely dedicated to those 90-and-above bottles – the New York Wine Experience, it’s called. And after attending Thursday’s opening tasting event, I got a better sense of what the ratings mean. And why so many oenophiles love (and loathe) them.

The knock against wine ratings – indeed, against any ratings – has always been that a bottle (or a book or a film) can’t be so easily encapsulated. But Wine Spectator’s ratings come under fire for other reasons. For starters, there are complaints that the ratings don’t take into account the pricing of wines — a wine may be worthy of a 95-plus score, but if it costs $200, is it as “good” as an 88-point wine that costs $15? On top of that, there’s an argument (often made by wine retailers) that the ratings make liquid pariahs out of many decent bottles, meaning it often becomes difficult to sell a wine below the 90-point mark (and especially below the 85 one). Finally, there’s some thought that the whole rating system has changed winemaking — and not necessarily for the better: Vintners take note of what bottles are receiving the higher scores and they start hewing to that particular style of winemaking, perpetuating it ad infinitum. It’s an issue particularly associated with famed wine critic Robert Parker; in fact, wines that are big and oaky often get dubbed as being “Parkerized.”

But what’s there to say in defense of ratings? Well, consumers love them precisely because they represent such a simplified guide and shopping tool. And Wine Spectator Executive Editor Tom Matthews makes the argument that, despite the seemingly subjective nature of ratings, the magazine takes pains to get them right: Wine Spectator’s critics go through a two-year apprenticeship to qualify for the honor of becoming a full-fledged reviewer. And the wines being rated (they’re sampled in groups) are tasted fully blind – the reviewer has no clue as to the label or the price – to ensure true objectivity. Plus, a “ringer” bottle is typically part of any grouping – meaning it’s a wine that the reviewer has previously critiqued: The idea is that if the reviewer’s opinion of a particular wine has changed dramatically, it could be a sign that his or her palate is off that day. (The result? The whole day’s tasting may be tossed out.)