Dariusz Galasiński: The paradox of wine scores – flawed, subjective yet still useful?

A few weeks ago, wine writer Simon Woolf wrote a stinging critique of wine scores. He contends that scores are subjective, out of context, individual, inconsistent, arguing that a scale consisting of a few dozen points is simply too overwhelming to handle. All these points are very well made; I agree with Woolf. Indeed, I recently wrote about score descriptions, which are internally inconsistent and, quite frankly, make no sense.

And yet, I thought, wine scores are common. So, are shops silly posting them? Are wine producers misguided in purchasing score stickers and placing them on their bottles? Are wine critics deluding themselves in scoring wines? Well, no, I do not think so. Scores can and often are useful. And I am afraid, even though I agree with Woolf, I also use them.

Let us imagine an average retail situation. You enter a wine shop (or the wine section of a shop) and you face a ‘wall of wine’, inevitably daunting. Hundreds, if not thousands of wines are there for you to choose from. And if you are like me, you do not come to the shop pre-prepared, with a list of bottles and producers, after doing thorough research on them. I love the exploration and choosing a bottle or several I just found. But the choice is never simple.

So, unless you want to spend hours in the shop, you need a speedy way to find your way round it. You might be lucky and a very competent shop assistant will help you but more often than not, at least in my experience, this will not happen. Moreover, I am unclear how a recommendation from a shop assistant is superior to a score from an experienced critic.

And even if you have come well prepared, you have read all sorts of tasting notes (often you will need to pay for them), do they really offer the information you need? All those references to apples and melons, cherries and plums, incessantly and inevitably multiplied, could as usefully be referred to as standard red/white fruit salad. So, how do you differentiate between dozens of rieslings whose descriptions are unlikely to differ all that much? And, more acutely, what do you do, if you are not a seasoned tasting note reader, let alone you have no access to the notes? We should also consider language barriers as wine reviews are now available globally. Linguistic nuance and acrobatics will be lost on so many of the readers who must rely on the score.

Scores, however flawed they are, offer a quick reference point for the confused customer who does not read much, cannot really smell the difference between unripe, ripe, cooked, fried, jammy strawberries and does not care about it. Or between thinly or thickly crushed stones, and soft or hard pressed white flowers. Scores offer a shortcut through the shop.

Personally, I use scores to look for consistency. For example, some shops where I buy wine post scores from multiple critics. I find it useful to see whether critics agree. I am not certain whether such information goes beyond the fact that critics agree, yet, if people who often have vast experience in tasting agree a wine is good (whatever it might actually mean), how much more information do I need? And no, score consistency does not mean I will find the wine delicious, it only tells me I am unlikely to regret my purchase much.

There is more, though. While I might not know what scores refer to (and I often wonder whether the critics do), I rely on critics’ ‘authority to taste’, much as in education we rely on teachers’ authority to teach. In other words, having spoken to and read stuff by Woolf, I would trust his judgement in telling me what a good wine is. Indeed, I have relied on his ‘un-scored’ advice. So, if he were to score a wine, I would read his score as conveying commitment behind the recommendation.

A score should come with a relationship of trust between me and the critic. Such trust could be accompanied by the critic’s authority, experience or simply a similar taste in wine, but it is the trust that makes the score useful. And if you trust the critic, the question of what exactly the critic scores, at least to an extent becomes moot. In fact, I would suggest that the score is not in the wine, it is in the trust I can place in the critic.

In conclusion, Woolf is right in arguing scores have no validity. That is to say, scores do not gauge what they are supposed to do; there is no objective reality that scores describe. I would still argue, however, they can be useful in an individual retail situation to someone who wants to buy wine quickly and without giving it much thought. They might not buy a better wine but they will feel more confident that they have made a decent choice.  The critic’s scores become a crutch without which wine purchasing decisions would be harder.

Scores’ usefulness is not in themselves but in the act of scoring and in the act of using them by the end user. It is an ironic situation in which something which is flawed is useful because of who awards them and how they are used in the here-and-now context of choosing a wine.

There is one more question, though. Can there be a scoring system capable of withstanding a criticism like Woolf’s. Possibly, at least partly. Although you will not get rid of the score’s subjectivity etc., you can prop it up by more transparency. I would love to know how exactly you score and what you score. I would love to know what your scores mean – how do you break them down, how do you arrive at them? I would love to have a clear, internally coherent scoring system which you present to me and then follow. Explicitly and transparently. I’m not, however, holding my breath.

• Dariusz Galasiński is a linguist and professor at the University of Wroclaw in Poland. He has been writing on experiences of mental illness and suicide. He also drinks wine and does research into how it is spoken about both by amateurs and professionals.