Where does your personal rating system bottom out?

Like the title asks. A wine is totally undrinkable. you hate it. everyone else hates it. what do you rate it?

also the flip side. whats it take to be a 100 point, 20/20 wine to you? does it have to be a WOTY? wine of a lifetime? best wine ever made?

Good question. I will have to get back to you on that.

My scale is totally subjective. The number of stars indicates how much I enjoyed a wine at the time. No more, no less. Assume wines are not tasted blind unless I say otherwise.

  • Avoid
    ** Just about acceptable, but I’d prefer to drink something else
    *** Perfectly acceptable to good. Most wines I drink are at this level
    **** Has that little something extra, e.g. intensity of flavour, complexity
    ***** Has a lot of something extra – a wow factor
    ****** Exceptionally good. Difficult to imagine how it could be improved

I don’t think I have used 1* in the last few years, partly because I would often call wines to be avoided “faulty”, and not score them. Most wines fall between 3* and 5*, with 2* and 6* being pulled out occasionally. Sometime I worry about personal grade inflation, but in my defence if I am going to bother writing a tasting note the wine usually has to be pretty decent anyway.

I think it is a misconception that the top score indicates perfection. if you imagine quality is infinitely variable but you have an integer scoring system, surely 100 means anything better than 99.5? In my case it is a lot more finger-in-the-air stuff, and the top scoring wines probably just hit the spot on a particular occasion. But IMO the mere fact that they are ABLE to do that is important in itself.

Apothic Red is the dregs

100pt wine? I’d like to try some 15-20yrs down the road to compare. Never personally rated anything that high. Stopped giving points years ago.

DNPIM (do not put in mouth)

More difficult for me, as I don’t like scoring wines, so don’t.

The only scale I ever felt moderately comfortable with was the £ (but you could substitute $) scale. Literally how much you think the wine is worth to you. Inspired by our original tasting group, where we used to say that after writing a TN. Linked to price paid, it’s a rather informative scale e.g. 17.5/12 is a wine I found really good value, and 12/20 is the reverse. The lowest score is also easy on this scale : 0

So I’ve taken a non-numeric approach to my personal wine ratings. I’ve taken things back to elementary school and as such, I assign a letter grade to each wine. Most earn a B rating, either B+, B, or B- but some reach the A category, and a more common wine will receive a C rating. D’s are reserved for those special patheic gems and F, well, that answers your question. An undrinkable wine receives this score. It may be rudimentary, but it works for me.

I love this question - lots of different ways to go with it. I still use points if only for a relative mark for how much I enjoyed something against other wines in the past. My scale runs from 75-100. I suppose if I just hated a wine and it wasn’t flawed, it gets a 75 or no rating from me. Most of my notes on CT follow a tighter bell curve around 88-94. For me, 90 means good, drinkable, without technical flaws, but doesn’t imply anything special at all. Scores in the 90s are more or less how much I remember liking a wine. Obviously, that’s a moving target, and I’m starting to fill in more scores in the upper 90s as my experience (and budget) grow. A 100 is the best wine I’ve tasted. It’s got to be a wow experience, with interest, complexity, technically flawless, memory imprinting, captivating - something you’ll be thinking about tomorrow and next week, like a great meal at Alinea or something. 100s should be hard to come by and those characteristics must be all from the juice itself i.e. not driven by company or setting. I remember drinking a Copain Pinot at Per Se. it’s a 91-92 point wine when I’m at home, but with good food, friends and a special occasion, felt like a 96. It’s hard to divide the two but I keep that in mind . Some folks drink a lot of exceptional wine, and may taste (and rate) 100s all the time. For me, I suppose it’s maybe an annual experience. To me, WOTY means simply, the best tasting grape juice I’ve put in my mouth this year (rather than best value or a producer with a story etc)

Btw it’s interesting that the burgundy scale (or Pinot in general?) is shifted back a great deal. Somehow it’s a lot harder for a Pinot to come by a 100 (even/especially from devoted enthusiasts). Hell, if Meadows gives it an 89, that may be a 94-95 in some folks’ book. Whereas If Parker gives it a 99, you never know…

Very important for people to use a scale they are comfortable with, or no score at all as many of us do. No benefit at all in trying to apply a score when you don’t like the scale or the concept of scoring.

I always found it interesting that the Italians never seemed to care for anything other than a simple scale, be it 0-3 glasses, 0-5 grapes or Veronelli who never much liked to concept at all. Only in recent years have we seen some using the 100 point scale (e.g. Luca Maroni, albeit I found the book of his I bought utterly useless, so maybe not the best example!).

For me 80 seems to be about as low as I expect to go. Looking at Cellartracker the lowest score I’ve given to a wine is 84 points (non-vintage Breaux Vineyards Serenity and to a Boen Pinot Noir). Anything under 87 is a wine that I would not buy again, one that has no real value to my palate.

I can foresee giving less than 80 points to a wine, but it wouldn’t be a “serious” wine that’s regularly discussed in forums like this one. The gawd-awful Mondavi Private Selections Cabernet Sauvignon comes to mind, which a friend recently brought for dinner and I had to force down.

I just can’t say a wine is 88 or 89 points so I use letter grades.

i personally like this scale. it acknowledges that its subjective and allows for the fact that tasting variation happens.

love the value/price ratio scale. thats a really helpful way to figure out the perceived value of a wine that gives somewhat of a sliding scale. i might start using this one more often.

I always wondered about this. compared to other rating apps I use, CT scores seem to be the hardest to get a feel for. a fantastic wine can be rated an 88+. I rarely ever see a wine rated over 92. wheras an app like Vivino seems pretty liberal with the 4+ scores.

that was kind of the other thing I was wondering. do you think your lowest CT score recently was an 84 because you just select much better wines now, or did you just really hate the Boen? eg: if you were rating an Apothic red, would it still fall in that mid 80s range?

Personally, I think my rating system is based on what percentile of wine i think that bottle is. if i think it is a 99th percentile wine, then it gets a 99. If i think it is a 5th percentile, i wouldnt hesitate to rate that low. with that in mind, a 100 would be very hard to come by, as would a 1.

All very good points, and a sensible system.

That said, in the world of 100 point scales (or at least CellarTracker) I probably wouldn’t go below an 80. At that point it’s an NR wine - i.e., likely spoiled or so bad it doesn’t deserve a rating (and really, I think I could make a more principled distinction between a 93 and a 94 than between a 75 and a 55.)

At the risk of a bit of thread drift…
I really wonder how credible twenty five point systems are (75-100). I’d say it’s tough enough to, for example, differentiate between 92 and 93 say at a single tasting. But how certain is it that 93 is better than a 92 when tasted a few months apart under probably different circumstances.

My personal favourite is the Johnson system (no, its not what you think). Extracted from former edition of his invauable Pocket Wine Guide
One Sniff: Minimum score, Emphatically, No Thanks.
One Sip: A step up
Two Sips: Faint interest - or disbelief
A Half Glass: Slight hesitation
One glass: Tolerance, even general approval

Two glasses: You quite like it, or there is nothing else to drink
Three glasses: More than accceptable
Four: : It tickles your fancy
One bottle: : More than satisfaction
Second bottle. : Is the real thumbs up

A full case. : You are not going to miss out on this one

And ultimately
The Whole Vineyard
(Which is a bit of an inside joke)

To answer the OP, I dont usually score but when. I do its 0 to 4 *, 0 for major fault, for minor but noticeable flaw and or seriously uninteresting, or truly awful style, theoretically drinkable but why bother.

so my question on a 75-100 point scale I guess is this: would 75 be a minimum score because even a pretty bad wine gets 75% credit for just not being vinegar? or is it just because when using a 100 point scale tradition says 0=less than 75? maybe the better way to phrase it is, where do those first 75 points in the scoring come from?

personally I love the “how much of this wine do I wanna drink?” scale. out of all of them ive seen, I think it is really the most informative for how you feel about it, and assumes that the score is a very personal and subjective thing, which a 100 point scale might not to (since so many people equate that to objectively derived grades on something like a multiple choice test)

BTW the meaning of The Wine Advocate scores is published here Robert Parker Wine Advocate
Not sure if it is still adhered to - I suspect there has been quite a bit of grade inflation since that was written

59 is the lowest because I think that is the lowest Cellartracker let’s you go.
To get to 100? Only gave one wine that ever and it was because I couldn’t imagine it being any better.

I usually don’t go below 80 if it’s below that there is usually a flaw. I score 100 points maybe 1-2 wines a year. But I like to score wines so I have something to reference on CT when I have multiple bottles and want to know what to expect on the next bottles ability to score good or bad :slight_smile:

I use the Zanotti binary system. 0 is not worth drinking and 1 is worth drinking.

Or a ternary system:
0 - do not drink
1 - drink sparingly
2 - drink liberally

I meant to add that my personal favourite description in the Johnson scale (that sounds slightly weird writing it like that) is the
Two sips = faint interest - or disbelief
You can almost picture the puzzled frown, the second sip and then the shrug or grimace.