In a recent posting on his website The Morning Claret, Simon Woolf astutely contemplates the state of wine competitions. Intriguing and encouraging are the dynamics of “discussion, retasting, and encouragement” among judges that regularly result in reassessments and a mutual learning experience. There’s no question humans are amenable to discussing or disputing taste and to rational persuasion, whether via requests to reexamine under a different aspect, to attend to characteristics one might have missed, or to see how those might be perceived to hang together in a certain way—perhaps whereby the whole proves more aesthetically appealing than the sum of its parts. Arguably, though, the role of point scores in group assessments ignores indefensible assumptions.
Woolf points to the ubiquity of “medal thresholds” at wine competitions as measured in points. But a cogent, credible account of group scoring would presuppose commensurability of tasters’ scores that is chimeric, its implausibility merely camouflaged by the shared use of numerals. As evidence, consider you and I are tasting the same St-Joseph under common conditions and ask each other what score (if forced to) we would award it. I say 90, and you say 88. Can we even conclude from this that I like the wine more, consider it a better example of the wine grower’s craft, or deem it a better example of some particular type among the many it represents (northern Rhône, St-Joseph, Syrah…) than you do? By no means. The numerical difference might instead reflect a difference in the level
This Article was originally published on World of Fine Wine