Dump the 100-Point Rating System Evan Powell, April 3, 2007 PointlessWines.com Just imagine, there you are, wandering the galleries of masterworks in the Getty Museum when you come upon Van Gogh’s Lilies. Aha! An original Van Gogh! But you wonder—is this is one of his great works? Are you supposed to be impressed? You have no idea. To your relief, the plaque next to the painting reads:  “Lilies, Vincent van Gogh; 1889, Saint-Remy, France. Art Spectator score: 91 points.” Ah! 91 points! So you know it's a pretty good effort, but not the best. Why waste time studying this particular work? You move on through the gallery, looking for paintings that the critics scored 95 or higher.   Or what if the World's Most Important Music Critics scored symphonies? Beethoven's Fifth gets a 100 of course; Mahler's Fifth a 95, and Sibelius' Fifth an 87. This way, people could avoid music the critics had already determined to be less than outstanding. After all, what is the point of listening to Sibelius when you've got Beethoven and Mahler?    Could not the 100-point rating system have application in pop culture, too? What Playboy reader wouldn't appreciate Hefner's rating of the centerfolds stamped on the plastic wrapper? ("I'd give her a 95 if she was blonde, but she's brunette, so she's an 89.")   Quite obviously, the scoring of art, music, and women on a 100-point scale is so tasteless that nobody has bothered to do it. But due to some unfortunate quirk of fate, the world of wine has not been so lucky. We are saddled with a cadre of self-appointed wine critics who labor ceaselessly to reduce wines, which are works of art in a glass, to two-digit numbers. What is worse, the consumer is actually influenced by this insanity. So instead of exploring the amazing diversity of expression in the wine world, consumers allow themselves to be manipulated by crude scores generated by the wine media. Therein lies the opportunity for money.   Thus we have critics like Robert Parker, the Hugh Hefner of wine, who finds the softest, most voluptuous, young, instantly gratifying wines, abundantly perfumed with oak, and idealizes them with high scores, thereby defining what great wine should be. He sets a cartoonish, centerfold standard of enological beauty that has had tremendous influence in the world of wine. Winemakers seeking to win high scores have created a legion of Stepford wines, lobotomized "me-too" products that attempt to replicate the centerfold ideal. They end up having no distinctive character, but instead taste just like last year's highest scoring swill.   The commanding influence of the leading wine critics has biased the industry toward the production of massive, heavily extracted, over-oaked, high alcohol wines that lack finesse and balance. Wines that are momentarily gratifying get higher scores than those that are made to age gracefully. Wines that reek of the stench of new oak get higher scores than those in which the oak is a more subtle, integrated component in the overall aromatic spectrum. Wines that are rich, dense and heavily-extracted get higher scores than those which are made in a lighter, more food-friendly style. Chardonnays get higher scores than Sauvignon Blancs. Expensive wines get higher scores than more moderately priced wines.   These are all subjective taste preferences that have nothing to do with the objective quality of the wine. Yet the consumer remains cluelessly duped by the critics into believing that their official scores are trustworthy indicators of a wine's quality. The media does its best to reinforce this fiction, even to the point of brazenly promoting such an inane concept as Wine Spectator's "Quality-to-Price Ratio."     For the moment there is no way to defeat the stranglehold the leading critics have on winemaking and wine marketing. The industry and consumers alike will continue to suffer for some time under the dictates of their prosaic palates. Eventually the influence of Robert Parker and Wine Spectator will die out, consumer tastes will evolve and mature, and the art of winemaking will once again find its balance.   In the meantime, we will take a stand against the big wine critics here in our little corner of cyberspace. To start with, we are dumping the 100-point rating system. There will be no scores, ratings, or rankings on this site. As far as we are concerned, every wine featured on PointlessWines.com is a 100-point wine in terms the sensory experience it delivers for the price. So instead of tasting a wine and making up a score, we will do it the old-fashioned way: When we find a wine we are really excited about, we will just write it up and tell you about it.

Wine Spectator’s Quality/Price Ratio   Wine Spectator's recent "Special Collector's Issue" (11/15/06) presented a concept called the Quality-to-Price Ratio, or QPR.  What is a wine’s QPR, you ask?  It is a quick and easy way to determine just how much you are paying for each Spectator point awarded any given wine. Seriously.   In this same issue they published a list of Napa’s 50 Best Cabernets. That list was arrived at through an exhaustive evaluation of the “quality” of some of the Cabernets made in Napa Valley. You see, they compiled the scores that they had assigned each of these wines in the vintages 1990 through 2003, and for each wine they calculated its average score over those fourteen vintages. That average score was then divided into the wine’s current retail price to come up with its Quality to Price Ratio. This number tells consumers how much they are paying for each Spectator point awarded. (I’m not making this up—it’s right there on page 72.)   In case the advantage of this scoring system is not obvious to you, consider this: The Freemark Abbey Bosché had a QPR of $0.73 a point, whereas the Staglin rated a QPR of $1.47 per point. That means, of course, that the Bosché is twice as cost-effective as the Staglin in its ability to deliver Spectator points.   As you can readily see, this scoring system is of immense value to anyone for whom the ultimate joy of wine comes from knowing they’ve gotten as many Spectator points in the glass for as little money as possible. What a handy consumer guide this is--you can check the QPRs ahead of time to discover that you are getting a great deal with the Bosché, and you’re getting hosed with the Staglin.   Our hats are off to Wine Spectator for coming up with this analytical breakthrough. However, we at PointlessWines.com have noticed a glitch in the system. To illustrate, Wine Spectator determined that the 2003 Kathryn Kennedy Santa Cruz Mtn Cabernet is worth 83 points. The price of this wine is $165, so the QPR score is $1.99 per point. Now, oddly enough, that means that the Kathryn Kennedy Cabernet QPR falls directly between that of the Shafer Hillside Select, which delivers Spectator points at $2.02 each, and the Dalla Valle Maya, with a QPR rating of $1.98 per point.   For wine lovers who are not mathematically inclined, the problem is this. Wine Spectator determined in this Collector's Issue that the Shafer Hillside Select is Napa Valley's 3rd best Cabernet, and the Dalla Valle Maya is Napa's 7th best Cabernet. So here we have the specter of a lowly 83-point wine from the Santa Cruz Mountains producing a statistical QPR score that lands it smack in the middle of Napa's elite Cabernets.   How could this possibly happen, you wonder? I know. We are as mystified as you are. But there it is—no avoiding it—a weird statistical anomaly that flies in the face of logic. As disturbing as it may be, we need to face the fact that it calls into question the essential viability of Wine Spectator's QPR ratings. Quite frankly, it makes them look almost absurd.