How Wine Scores Work: Buying Someone’s Opinion

A wine score is the shortest piece of wine writing there is. Two digits standing in for a vineyard, a vintage, a decade of decisions, and one person’s afternoon. It is the most efficient signal in the business and the most frequently misread.

Most people meet scores long before anyone explains them. The number appears on a shelf talker, a tech sheet, an email announcing a release, and it does its work silently: this one is better than that one.

Where the number came from

The 100-point scale is younger than most people assume, and it was not the first of its kind. What Robert Parker did with The Wine Advocate, beginning in 1978, was make a 50-to-100 scale the standard by mapping it to the American school grading system. No training required. A reader who had survived tenth grade already knew how to read it.

The design worked so well it swallowed the industry, and it created a distortion. On paper, the scale runs from 50 to 100. In practice, the lower half empties out almost immediately, for a simple reason: a critic who dislikes a wine tends not to publish on it at all, and a wine no one reviews has no score to speak of. What survives is a narrow band near the top, a dozen points wide, and with commercial consequence.

Those consequences are not spread evenly. Somewhere around 90 there is a line. It is invisible on the shelf and unmistakable inside the trade. Above it, a wine earns the small placard beneath the bottle, consideration for a restaurant list, a distributor willing to argue on its behalf. Below it, those doors close politely and without explanation. Two points can carry a wine across that line or leave it just short of it. The same two points higher up, between a wine at 93 and a wine at 95, settle almost nothing, because nothing is waiting at that altitude to be settled.

So the distances on a hundred-point scale are not really distances. They are thresholds, and the thresholds were drawn by commerce rather than taste.

How a wine gets scored

It starts with a critic who sets the calendar. Word arrives that a critic will be in the region for two or three weeks, and every winery inside that radius rearranges itself to fit the window. At Seven Apart, the preference is always to host the tasting on the property, walking the critic through the vintage, pouring barrel samples alongside finished wines, letting a wine be judged in the place that grew it. That is the ideal, and often unavailable.

When an on-property visit isn’t possible, there are two other routes. A winery can ship bottles to a critic’s tasting office, a controlled and professional setting, though the wine travels to reach it (which can negatively influence the wine). Or it can submit through a regional trade tasting, where a visiting critic may work through five or six hundred wines in the course of a few days.

Both routes cost a wine something that a tasting at the estate would have preserved, and the loss is subtle. A wine is never tasted alone. It is tasted after something and before something else, and those neighbors shape the impression it leaves behind. A very good bottle poured among mediocre ones flatters itself. That same bottle set down in a flight of exceptional wines can read as merely fine. “It can get lost in the lineup,” says winemaker Morgan Maurèze, “and you do not know what lineup it is, or who you are being tasted next to.”

This is not a scandal. It is what assessing hundreds of wines in a week asks of a person, and it is a standing reason to hold any single number loosely.

There is one more piece of the mechanics that catches people off guard. The scoring calendar and the release calendar are not the same calendar. A critic’s travel and publishing deadlines are set first, a winery’s bottling schedule is set second, and the two don’t always meet. A wine can be released, purchased, and poured well before a critic has seen it. Seven Apart is in exactly that position now, with a wine that will reach members weeks before it reaches a critic’s glass. The absence of a score at release is a matter of scheduling, not a verdict.

Critics are also unreadable in the room, and deliberately so. Some are warm and talkative. Some say nothing at all. “Sometimes it is just crickets,” Maurèze says. “They do not say anything. And you are like, is that a good thing?” Weeks later the score arrives and answers the question. Keeping the cards close is precisely what independence asks of them.

Why two experts taste the same wine and disagree

A consistent pattern emerges whenever researchers set the major critics side by side on the same wines. They agree, broadly and reassuringly, about which wines are sound. They part company about which ones are extraordinary. Critics converge on the floor and scatter at the ceiling, which puts the disagreement exactly where a collector is paying closest attention.

The more startling finding came out of a large American wine competition, where a researcher poured the same wine three separate times into the same judge’s flight without telling anyone. Most judges did not arrive at the same verdict twice. A few dismissed a pour and then, twenty minutes later, praised the identical wine. These were credentialed, experienced palates working in good faith, and the wine had not changed at all. Only its place in the event had changed.

Maurèze puts the working version of this more plainly. “It all depends on whose palate you are calibrated to.” Managing Partner Yannick Girardo, who keeps a running record of the estate’s reviews, sees the same thing from the other side of the glass. The gap between different respected critics who are writing about the same vintage is regularly wide enough that the more useful question is not what the wine scored but who was tasting. Same juice, different mouths.

None of this is peculiar to wine. Every art form has its critics, and every critic has a taste of their own. A reviewer who has loved a director’s last five films tells you something worth knowing about the sixth, not because that director is objectively superior but because their sensibility and the critic’s happen to agree. Follow a critic long enough to learn whether their judgment holds true for you and it becomes valuable. Follow one whose taste runs contrary to yours and you will be misled, confidently and at length.

Girardo notes something else in passing. “I do not know any other industry that uses this system. I do not think you will see painters being rated based on their art.” Wine volunteered for a kind of quantified judgment that most creative disciplines declined. The number is a convention the business adopted, not a property of the liquid.

Two ways to read a score

For the casual shopper, a score works as a tiebreaker, and there is nothing wrong with that. Two unfamiliar bottles at a similar price, no one nearby to ask, only a few hours left before dinner: the rated one is the sensible pick. What the score is doing at that moment is settling a choice already narrowed on other grounds. It closes the decision rather than opening it, and for most everyday purchases that is all anyone needs from it.

The second reading belongs to the collector, and it repays the patience it asks for. Find the critic whose palate genuinely maps onto yours and their reviews become a real instrument, capable of leading you to wines you would never have found alone. There is no shortcut to that calibration and no way to look it up. You buy the wines a critic praised, you notice honestly whether you agreed, and somewhere around the twelfth bottle a pattern surfaces. For anyone building a cellar meant to be opened across decades, it is among the better investments available.

Even then, scores occupy a smaller place in most decisions than the industry assumes. When Seven Apart surveyed wine drinkers, the large majority said a score had not driven their purchase. That matches what happens in our tasting room, where conversations about ratings are rare enough to be memorable. People buy this wine because they have stood in the vineyard, or because someone they trust put a glass in their hand.

Influencers are critics with a different business model

The arrival of wine on social media has not repealed any of this. It has restated it.

A critic and an influencer do the same job through different plumbing. Both are individuals whose preferences narrow an unmanageable field into something a person can act on, and both are useful in exact proportion to how closely their taste tracks yours. One publishes behind a subscription, the other publishes freely and is paid another way, and neither arrangement reveals a thing about whether their palate is yours.

If anything the problem is harder with influencers. A published number at least invites comparison against that same critic’s other numbers, which is how calibration begins. Enthusiasm on camera offers no such handhold. The discipline does not change: establish that this person’s taste has predicted your own experience before you begin to trust it.

The cost of admission

Begin with the plain fact that the scores are difficult to access. Serious criticism lives behind a subscription, sold by the year and one critic at a time, so following two or three of them becomes a standing annual expense. Wineries carry these subscriptions themselves, since it is frequently the only way to see their own reviews. The result is a closed circle that the industry funds and the industry reads. Anyone who tries to look up a score casually tends to find they cannot, and ends up hunting down a tech sheet instead.

Then there is what a score does to a price. The trade has a name for this, the Parker effect, after the critic whose ratings first made it visible. A group of economists found a way to measure it in Bordeaux. In most years the scores arrive before the châteaux set their prices, which makes cause impossible to separate from effect. In one year the order reversed and the scores came out afterward. Comparing that year against the others revealed what the reviews had been worth: a few euros a bottle on average, on wines releasing in the teens, and considerably more as a wine’s reputation climbed. A high score does not merely describe a bottle. It moves it.

Put those two facts together and the shape of a real problem appears. The wines that get reviewed are, broadly, the wines already expensive enough to justify a critic’s travel. The reviews then push those prices higher still. And reading the reviews costs money of its own. For someone in their twenties beginning to care about wine, every door in that sequence opens onto a more expensive room. They cannot easily afford the bottles that carry scores, so they never learn what a score is worth to them, so the scores never become useful, and a system built to guide people toward good wine skips a generation without ever meaning to. Nobody designed it that way. It is what the incentives produced, and the industry has been slow to build the entrance that would undo it.

What a score is for

Here is the most useful way to hold all of this. A score is not a grade handed down on a wine. It is a matchmaking signal, and it does real work by helping a particular bottle find the particular people most likely to love it.

Read that way, the disagreement between critics stops looking like a defect and becomes the most informative thing in the system. When one reviewer is captivated by a wine that leaves another unmoved, that is not noise. That is the wine describing its own audience. Somebody out there tastes the way the enthusiastic critic tastes, and the review has just told them where to look.

It also settles the question of how much weight the number deserves. A score is one signal among many, and not the most personal of them. The sommelier who has spent two years learning what pleases your palate knows something no critic can. A friend whose cellar you have been drinking from for a decade knows more still. Standing in the vineyard, meeting the people who farmed it, tasting a wine in the place that made it: all of that is information, and most of it is richer than two digits.

None of which makes critics adversaries. They do careful work under real constraints, and a thoughtful review can introduce a wine to exactly the person who will treasure it. But a critic describes a moment in taste, and taste moves. Trends arrive, crest, and recede. The people who finally decide whether a wine was worth making are the ones who open it years later at their own tables.

Which is why Seven Apart does not make wines in the sole pursuit of scores.

“We keep trying to craft the wines that we like,” says Maurèze, “and I think that is the most important part, trying to stay true to your identity rather than changing everything about you just to be popular.”

The reference model is Bordeaux: fixed vineyards, worked patiently across decades, expressing the same ground year after year so a drinker tastes the site rather than the fashion. That consistency takes years to build and cannot be reverse-engineered from a scorecard. A wine made to satisfy one particular palate will need remaking the day that palate retires. Made honestly and consistently enough, a wine finds the people it was always going to suit, and the scores are simply one of the roads they travel to reach it.

The verdict that settles it

None of this argues against scores. A critic tastes more wine in a month than most of us will taste in a decade, and that experience is real and hard won. Read with the right expectations, a score is a considered opinion from someone who has earned the right to hold one, and the best of them are written with genuine care.

But it was formed on an afternoon you were not present for, in an order you did not choose, among bottles you will never see. It cannot know who is at your table, how the evening has turned, or which wines have stayed with you across the years. A bottle opened on a long summer evening is not selected the way an investment is selected. It is chosen the way you choose the music for a room, for how well it suits the people in it.

So learn the critics. Find the ones whose judgment has proven true for you, and let them lead you toward wines you would not have found alone. Then open the bottle and decide for yourself. A score is a stranger’s best guess at what you will love. Yours is the only verdict that was ever going to settle it.