What's the Score?

I'm here to save the day (read: make things more complicated)

Have you ever found yourself wanting to buy a nice bottle of wine, but without tasting it how can you know if you like it or, more importantly, if it’s worth the price tag? Fear not! Most wines with some degree of popularity will have been scored by some knowledgeable person, with a view to helping the consumer know the quality.

But what actually is the score?

The rating of wines has been around for a bloody long time, in one form or another. In Bordeaux, the famous 1855 classification produced a list of the best wines in the region at the time, by order of Emperor Napoleon III - and this classification is still used and referred to today!

It wasn’t until quite recently (in the grand scheme of wine) that critics started to use a numerical system to score wines. The American wine critic Robert Parker is credited with starting the 100 point scale, based on the American school system of grading, and this is generally the most used form of wine scoring in the industry. In theory this seems a relatively simple way of rating something, 1 being terrible and 100 being perfect - right? right? wrong.

You see, this 100 point scale only starts at 50 (makes perfect sense if you ask me…), and you’d be hard pressed to find a score from any major critic that lands outside of the 85-100 point mark. So why bother? What is the point of having this scale if no-one ever uses the full thing? Maybe wine has just been getting better throughout the years, with no wine ever being considered as mediocre anymore, or at least any wine that has been sent for scoring by the producer. Or maybe critics don’t want to negatively mark a wine and damage their relationship with a producer, and put off consumers from buying that wine.

That brings about the question: are wine ratings honest? Let’s say you are an ‘up-and-coming’ wine journalist invited to a top Chateau to taste the latest vintage. What happens if you find that wine to be lacking, disappointing, or just straight up bad? Do you write an honest review, and score the wine poorly and risk never being invited back and excluded from other Chateau’s list of ‘trusted’ critics? Or do you write a positive spin on the wine, and secure your invite to the next tasting (and lots of other lovely treats I’m sure)? I’d hope that all journalists have buckets of integrity and would never consider altering the truth in order to keep producers happy…

When I’m tasting a wine on my socials, or for a post on here, I would quite like to be able to place a rating on it. The trouble is I have an innate desire to be unique and so using a system that already exists just doesn’t interest me. For the sole reason of being difficult I have decided to come up with my own rating scale, which shall henceforth be know as the ‘Magna Puncta’¹ . If you have any ideas for a better name, please do let me know in the comments.

The ‘Magna Puncta’ is a 0.0 to 10.0 wine rating system that I hope will bring some precision and personality to my scores, but I guess we won’t really know until I’ve put it to the test. This is a work in progress, sliding scale, most likely to be abolished system but let’s go with it.

Wines will be rated against 5 parameters; Scent, Taste, Feel, Finish, and Soul. This should bring some consistency and objectivity into my scores, with a touch of personal opinion. Let’s expand on those a bit, I’ve given them each a weighting with only and Taste and Soul having more or less than 20% because a) how a wine tastes is pretty damn important, and b) the subjectivity of ‘Soul’ could do with a lower weighting so that the overall score is more affected by the critical parameters.

• Scent – Weight: 20%

  • How the wine smells, from the initial hit of the aromas to the more subtle nuances. Is it fragrant, complex, or inviting? Does it evolve as the wine opens up, or does it feel flat and boring?

• Taste – Weight: 30%

  • This is all about the flavours that you can (you guessed it!) taste. Are they well-balanced, layered, and yummy, or is there a dominance of one note? This will take into account the intensity, complexity, and overall impression of the taste.

• Feel – Weight: 20%

  • The tactile experience of the wine on the palate. Is it smooth or velvety, rough or astringent? How does the structure feel in your mouth, is it heavy or light?

• Finish – Weight: 20%

  • How long the flavours hang around after you’ve swallowed. A long, pleasant finish can indicate quality, while a short or harsh finish can mean the opposite. Is there a subtle evolution of flavour or does it fade quicker than your iPhone’s battery after the warranty expires?

• Soul – Weight: 10%

  • That personal feeling, that ‘WOW-Factor’, the ‘Je ne sais quoi’. What does it make you feel? For me, most of my memories have a smell attached to them, and occasionally when I taste a wine I am brought back to a specific place and time. Bad luck for the winemaker if it reminds me of one my childhood traumas!

Once we put the wine through all of these questions, it should come out with a score between 0.0 and 10.0, and generally I would like for the below table to be as close to what the ratings will actually be (it may need some fiddling so watch this space).

So there we have it. My very own wine rating system, all that’s left to do is drink some wine and start rating it! What I reckon I’ll start doing is weekly round-ups on my TikTok of what I’ve drunk that week, and their respective scores. I may even keep an enormous spreadsheet of all the wines I’ve rated, who knows?! It’s all quite exciting…

1. I reserve the right to change this ridiculous name as and when I feel like it, but for now let me be silly.