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A great wine is a lot more than a number.

A wine rating is a summary of the appraisal of a wine by one or more critics—most famously Robert Parker, whose 100-point scale came to dominate the wine world from the 1970s until his retirement in 2019. Other systems remain in use, while many websites now invite wine lovers to contribute their own ‘community ratings’.

In theory, a numerical score merely supplements a tasting note. In practice, the tasting note—if it even exists—is often ignored, and the wine reduced to a single headline number.

This has obvious advantages. Ratings convey information clearly and simply, especially to novices. Assuming the tasting has been conducted under rigorously blind conditions, they reflect quality rather than price or reputation. They encourage producers to improve, and reward those who do. Wines awarded more than 90 points are considerably easier to sell, while those in the high nineties can become cult wines almost overnight. Château Tirecul la Gravière, in Monbazillac, became an overnight sensation after Robert Parker awarded 100 points to its 1995 Cuvée Madame.

Yet ratings can be criticised on three grounds: concept, procedure, and consequences.

The first objection, then, is conceptual. However objective or scientific a score may appear, it remains an expression of human judgement.

Consider these two reviews of the same wine:

The greatest Cantenac Brown I have ever tasted, the 2010 is one for the ages.
V, v sweet, And alcoholic. And a bit drying on the end—a sort of right-bank Margaux. What’s the point?

The first is from Robert Parker. The second, Jancis Robinson.

What is Beethoven’s Ninth out of 100?

What is the Sistine Chapel out of 100?

How much do you love your partner out of 100?

A great wine, too, is more than an object of measurement. It is the expression of a place, a season, and the care and attention of those who made it. It can certainly be judged, but not reduced to a single number.

Scoring wines might be compared to ranking contestants in a beauty pageant. Like the contenders in the pageant, the wines are often very young, and scores cannot fully account for the delights and disappointments that are yet to come. In any case, the prettiest boy or girl is probably not on the stage but sitting at home buried in War and Peace. Many of the most hallowed producers shun competitions, mainly, I think, because they have little to gain and much to lose. Artisan winemakers, who make the most soulful wines, do not have the time or means to enter competitions.

The second objection is procedural. Competition scores are influenced not only by personal preferences and prejudices, but also by the context and conditions of the tasting, and, in a panel, by the group dynamics, with junior judges exquisitely sensitive to every ‘um’ and ‘aah’ from the more distinguished panel chair. The outcome of this process might be of existential import to the producer, who has toiled for a year, indeed, several years, to make his or her wine, but in fact reflects no more than a few seconds of tasting with no or very little time for discussion and debate.

There is also a financial incentive to dish out medals, which invite further paid entries and increase sales of medal stickers. As a result, there has been a devaluation of wine scores over the years—so that many wineries would now hesitate to publicise a score below 90.

The third objection concerns consequences. The highest-rated wines often become objects of speculation, traded like financial assets rather than uncorked and enjoyed around a table.

More subtly, ratings favour wines that make an immediate impression on a fatigued palate: concentrated, powerful, and rich in fruit, oak, and tannin. More restrained wines—those that whisper rather than shout and speak more faithfully of place—are liable to be undervalued. This contributed significantly to the homogenisation—or ‘Parkerization’—of wine styles during the late twentieth century.

Wine ratings have played an important role in the rise of wine culture, but their grip seems to be loosening, if not quite fading, as consumers become more experienced and knowledgeable—and as wine scores tend asymptotically towards 100.

To me, a score of 98 is a signal for caution.

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If you enjoyed this article, you might also enjoy my book The Concise Guide to Wine and Blind Tasting, which explores not only how to taste wine, but why it matters. Practical yet thoughtful, it will help you taste with greater confidence—and greater pleasure.

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The Long History of One of Wine’s Greatest Ideas

Vincent van Gogh’s The Red Vineyard (1888). The finest wines have many stories to tell.

Most people think terroir means soil. Others think it means climate. Everyone agrees the concept is French. Everyone is only partly right.

Terroir is the entire relationship between a vine and its environment, including even the animals and people within it. Climate, geology, topography, soil microorganisms, plants and insects, centuries of accumulated know-how, and the choices of the grower and winemaker are only some of the things that contribute to the character of a wine. Terroir is not any one of these things but the interaction between them. The whole is much greater than the sum of its parts.

It took humanity thousands of years to arrive at this deceptively simple idea.

The first winemakers, in the South Caucasus some eight thousand years ago, left no written record. But they almost certainly understood that some vineyards produced better wines than others.

What we can be sure of is that, by the time of Homer (eighth century BCE), certain wines had already become famous. In the Odyssey, Odysseus carries the priest Maron’s Ismarian wine, so rich and fragrant that it has to be diluted with twenty parts water—and, even then, fills the room with perfume. Indeed, it is potent enough to bring down the Cyclops Polyphemus. Homer assumes his audience will recognise the wine’s reputation. Long before anyone understood why some places produced extraordinary wines, the Greeks already knew that they did.

In the fourth century BCE, Aristotle’s friend and student Theophrastus asked a new question: why? In his two great botanical works, Enquiry into Plants and On the Causes of Plants, he seeks not merely to describe plants but to explain them. ‘There are as many kinds of grapes as there are kinds of soil,’ he observes. It is a simple but revealing remark. For perhaps the first time, someone was looking beyond the reputation of a vineyard and, like Master Aristotle, asking about causes.

The Romans carried the idea further. Virgil famously wrote, Bacchus amat colles—’Bacchus loves the hills’—suggesting that vines do their best on well-drained slopes. Writing in the first century CE, Pliny the Elder argued that when a vine is transplanted, ‘it changes its character so completely owing to the difference of soil and climate that it is never recognised as the same.’ His conclusion is strikingly modern: ‘It is a fact that the soil matters more than the vine.’

Yet the Romans also contributed something even more enduring than practical viticulture. They spoke of the genius loci: the spirit of the place. A great vineyard possessed a character that everyone knew, but no one could fully explain. It was more than its soil, more than its climate, more than the skill of the grower. It had a spirit of its own.

Modern science has transformed our understanding of wine. We can analyse soils, study climates, sequence vine genomes, and measure almost every aspect of a vineyard. Yet in so doing we sometimes forget what the ancients grasped intuitively. A great vineyard, like any balanced ecosystem, is more than the sum of its measurable parts.

As a blind taster, I encounter this truth every time I lift a glass. A Chablis should not taste like a Napa Chardonnay, nor a Mosel Riesling like one from Clare Valley. The finest wines carry unmistakable traces of where they come from—even of the eucalyptus of Coonawarra and the garrigue of Provence. Their place speaks through them.

For this reason, I have never been fond of heavy-handed oak. Oak has its place, and in skilful hands it can add harmony and complexity. But when it overwhelms a wine, it drowns out many of the very signals that blind tasters rely upon and wine lovers cherish. Instead of hearing the voice of the vineyard—the genius loci—we hear only the barrel from another place.

Perhaps that is the deepest meaning of terroir. It is not merely a list of soils, climates, or slopes. It is the elusive way in which a place leaves its signature upon a wine. The highest calling of a winemaker is not to silence that voice, but to listen for it—and let it speak.

Sources: Homer, Odyssey 9.208–211; Theophrastus, Enquiry into Plants 3.11 and On the Causes of Plants; Virgil, Georgics 2.113; Pliny the Elder, Natural History 14.4–5, 17.3–8.