In his latest dispatch, The Oenophiliac, J.M. Garcia III, wrestles with the 100-point wine rating scale… and pins it to the mat. 

We have but one goal in mind: To demystify the world of wine for those who have, heretofore, been mystified by it. Surely a noble calling. Yet we were not the first to take steps towards this goal. Several pioneers, seemingly quite interested in both numerology and viticulture have preceded us. In their wake they have left tools and resources of varying degrees of usefulness. The most famous such tool is the now infamous 100-point wine rating scales used such heavy-hitters as Robert Parker and the editors of The Wine Enthusiast. Now, any vaguely sentient wine enthusiast has, by this point, begun to notice there have been rumors, whispers, meaningful glances and murmurs against the venerable 100-point scale. But you won’t get any whispers or murmurs about it from me.

Instead, you’ll get an unambiguous broadside against it.

Sexy, but Vapid
Sure, the 100-poin scale makes a lot of sense from a marketing standpoint. A “99-point wine” sounds pretty damn sexy. But the sad fact is that, like many things which seem sexy when viewed casually and from afar, it’s actually vapid and meaningless. (Think “Young Hollywood.”)

Better yet, this scale is so meaningless, on so many different levels, that it’s a veritable buffet for oeno-malcontents. If you would be so kind as to notice — or simply be so kind as to trust me on this — the number of wines rated below 70 by the major adherents of the 100-point scale is functionally zero. Why, if a wine ever received a 60-something-point rating, the vintner would probably be subject to prosecution by an international tribunal in The Hague. So, right off, we must admit this is really only a 30 point scale.

Big, Important Wines Only Need Apply
Compounding the uselessness of the scale is those wines that manage to sit in the 90 to 100-point step of the ziggurat. You’d think a wine that scored 97 points would be near the top of its kind. You’d also be wrong. The wines that hit that rarefied air are almost all “Big Important Wines” — Cabernets, Chardonnays, Bordeaux, the odd Rieslings… that sort of thing. Still don’t believe me? Let’s take a little test.

Go to your favorite wine publication’s website and click your cynical self over to the “search the ratings” section. Select a Beaujolais. Now ask the search to return only those Beaujolais with a score of 95-100. How many did the search bring up? None? Now try it with, say, Sauvignon Blanc. Or maybe a Rosé, any Rosé. Still nothing? Hmm. How about Chenin Blanc?

Starting to see a pattern here?

Cynics would proclaim that any wine that’s not hovering at 15 percent alcohol and tasting of a half-forest’s worth of oak stands no chance of the big score. Not I, of course, but cynics would. Seen from a different angle, this means that if you limit your purchases to 95-plus point wines, your cellar will look mighty monotonous. To make things more interesting, if you decide that you want to eat only what will pair well with such a cellar, you have a lifetime of ceaseless black-and-blue prime rib ahead of you (making said lifetime conveniently briefer) with the odd lobster for variety.

Reflect on that for a moment.

And while you’re being all reflective, add to the mix this interesting factoid: The greatest (authentic) Beaujolais ever will never score as well as a Great Big Cabernet from a half-decent year. Stop me if I am spouting lunacies. Then you have the problem that it’s usually one single person who assigns a score to a wine. You’re counting on that reviewer to not have had a fight with the teenage daughter the night before, to have gotten a good night’s sleep, to not have gambled away the milk money in Vegas, etc.

If it was left there, then this would be but a mere annoyance. But it’s not. You see, the average wine drinker, when graduating to more serious levels of sophistication, starts taking these all-but-arbitrary numbers as Gospel. When Chateau St. Nobody gets a 95, and its sales quadruple overnight, other winemakers in similar situations start looking like Uncle Scrooge when he discovered his next door neighbor picking diamonds out of his backyard. For these guys, the ticket to fame and lucre is simple: get a wine rated at 90-plus points.

By now you have spotted the flaw, haven’t you? To get 90-plus points you cannot make the traditional, authentic wine of the region with the native grape. You must ply the wine with oak, load it up with overripe and jammy fruit, wildly astringent with tannins, and heavy with alcohol until it resembles the other 90-plus wines and not the ideal Beaujolais, Montepulciano d’Abruzzo or Chablis. Which means you can’t pair up this wine with paella, or bucatini amatriciana. And that leaves you back where we started.

Do We Really Need All 100 Points?
Naturally, we are not going to dismantle, or even reform, the 100 point scale. (Yet.) Instead, let’s constrict the 100-point-but-really-only-30-point scale a little bit more. If the current scale throws out all numbers below 70,  let’s take it a step further and throw out all numbers below 85. And then, to show ‘em who’s boss, throw out all the numbers above 89. There. We have just hacked the unwieldy 100 point scale to its real range of 30 and then to its useful range of five. To make it even more fun, you can use symbols instead of numbers. You know: hearts, peace signs, My Little Ponies or, like Vinapedia, spades.

So let’s go back to the online ratings experiment, only instead of seeking wines rated 95-plus you seek wines rated 85 to 89. Better selection, right? But what else have you noticed? That’s right. Prices are also far more reasonable. In fact, if you want to have fun, contrast the average price of an 89-point wine to the average price of a 90-point wine. Then ask yourself if that extra point is worth the 20 to 45 percent jump in price.

Answer: No.

So there you have it, a clearing in the ratings jungle.

—J.M. Garcia III