Wine Scores
How does a wine get a score? And does that number matter to you?
With the All Canadian Wine Awards taking place in Picton this week, I thought it could be helpful for you to understand a little about the marketing machine that are wine scores.
There are two main ways through which a wine can acquire a score; either in a competition or by a critic. The effect of a high score can help further promote a wine and give consumers a sense of confidence when purchasing.
There are a few different ways to judge wines in a competition. Broadly speaking, wines are assigned to specific categories and tasted blindly in flights to assess quality by a panel of judges, typically consisting of wine writers, sommeliers, and other critics. The top wines from each flight are grouped together and tasted again by another group of judges. This might go on for a few rounds until there is a clear winner.
From there the wines are usually ranked as gold, silver, or bronze. Sometimes there might even be a wine declared “best in show”..
Wineries pay fees to enter competitions, with each entry incurring an individual fee. And they must submit three bottles of each wines entered. So, if a winery enters five different wines, for example, they incur five entry fees plus the cost of fifteen bottles, per competition. It can become an expensive marketing strategy.
Certain competitions are more prestigious than others, with different wine awards holding varying degrees of clout, so it is important for the consumer to know who is scoring the wines.
The other main way to get scores is for a winery to send a single bottle to a notable critic with hopes that they will write a tasting note and provide a score for it.
Some critics are highly trained with professional wine credentials while others might be long-time players n the wine industry long enough to have garnered a respectable reputation, usually within a particular county or region.
And lately, the wine world has seen a proliferation of influencers on almost all social media channels. Sometimes they offer up scores, but more so they seem to be used by wineries to further promote their wines through the influencer’s audience.
In North America, wines are typically scored out of 100 with most wines ranking between 85-100. This system was popularized by Robert Parker in his Wine Advocate newsletter and is now used world-wide, with the notable exception of the English wine writer Jancis Robinson, who uses the 20-point scale. This scoring system was developed for academia at UC Davis’s Viticulture and Enology department, but has not been universally accepted in the same vein as the 100-point system.
What is important to you, the consumer, is to know who is scoring these wines. Just as with films, books, music or any other form of art, there will always be a wine critic or reviewer whose opinion you relate to.
If you are unsure but intrigued by a wine buy it and try it. You may love it, or you may not. That is all part of the adventure. With each wine sampled, the more confidence you will gain in tasting and appreciating the contents of your glass.