Not Everyone Hates Scores

Reactions from last week's article

Predictably enough, there were plenty of reactions to my piece about wine scores. It’s a subject that seems to get people fired up. Most comments were in violent agreement with my sentiments, which made me ponder this:

Is there a natural wine lover, or anyone involved in the sector who is actually pro-scores? Please tell me if this is you. There seems to be a very clear divide between the fine wine world (which is still wedded to points) and the artisan AKA natural AKA low-intervention world (which has consistently ignored them). Take for example the provocative promotional campaign for the eighth edition of the Karakterre fair in 2019, which bore the tag line “Parker gave me 50”.

Richard Baudains

felt that I should double-down, and made this succinct point:

The pseudo-objectivity of points scoring is actively misleading and cultivates a false idea about the nature of wine and wine criticism

Adam Papaphilippopoulos

cautioned that my comparison with the academic sector might not hold water:

Though I don't have in-depth analysis to offer, from talking to the handful of academics I know in arts and humanities, and having completed too many such degrees myself, I suspect the same issues and grade distributions apply in marking essays in arts and humanities against what can only be relatively loose marking rubrics. I don't think that makes them meaningless.

But one of my colleagues, the British wine critic and journalist

Anthony Rose

did not buy my thesis at all. Actually, it was his comment that I quoted in the original article.

Anthony very kindly took the time to note down his thoughts in long-form, and I am publishing his response below. I don’t necessarily agree with his point of view, but he makes some convincing arguments.

Have a read, and tell us what you think in the comments - or in my subscriber chat if you prefer.

Are Wine Scores Just for Wine Bores?

Poke the bear, or in this case the Woolf and you can expect a reaction, but is his howl worse than his bite? Considerately, Simon was careful not to personalise the issue, whether in the interests of healthy discussion or the threat of reprisals from the anti-scoring mob. According to Simon, “scores are not considered to be very cool in natural-wine-world”. I’ll come back to this point later.

I am by no means a score evangelist. I went through my time at UK newspaper The Independent without scoring wines. Scores were only just becoming a thing, introduced as an effective additional tool to fine wine recommendations by Robert Parker. I wrote mainly about everyday wines and I was able to hide my relative lack of experience behind the authority of the Independent. But then I was a dog lover, now I’m a cat lover. People change, views change, tastes change. It’s allowed.

In Praise of Parker