This might seem silly, especially since one of my jobs as a WSET wine educator is to assess the tasting notes of students, but here goes: I really don’t like points scores or wine competitions at all.
In fact, I have a problem with the entire concept of judgement in general, but that’s a story for another day.
Sean P. Sullivan, who writes the fantastic Northwest Wine Report, seems to have very similar feelings to me on this subject. And I absolutely love how he uses the slightly ancient Fonzie jumping the shark reference to address the issue 🦈
I still remember watching that episode as a tween and thinking, “huh?”
But I digress.
“Wine competitions have long been a dubious side of the industry. Wineries submit wines along with a healthy submission fee; competitions send back shiny medals that have a strong whiff of pay-to-play, particularly as most every wine typically wins a medal. The situation recently, however, has gotten considerably worse.”
Yes, this has been one of the things that makes my eyes roll for sure. Sean’s article mentions a famous American wine competition, but there’s a Canadian counterpart that I’ve long had very little interest in following, even as my former boss in the Okanagan Valley, whose wines often won gold medals, routinely had me tout these awards to our clients. Really, our wines were very good, but when more than 50% of the wines entered get some sort of award, what is the point?
“The 100-point system rules the marketplace. Giving medals to every wine is apparently no longer enough to ensure the submissions keep coming. Now the wines need stratospheric scores to go with those medals.”
Sean’s point is true. The consumers want scores, so we give them scores, even if they don’t really mean that much about the actual quality of the wine.
In the WSET, we aim to teach students how to assess wines using a Systematic Approach to Tasting (SAT) that takes personal preference out of the equation and encourages the students to identify the characteristics of a wine from a neutral, standardized perspective. It’s not a perfect system by any means, but it’s a good start for having a global language to discuss wine.
From these assessments, we put each wine into one of four general categories based on the criteria of balance, length, intensity, and complexity.
Acceptable (the wine has one of the four criteria present)
Good (the wine has two of the four criteria present)
Very Good (the wine has three of the four criteria present)
Outstanding (the wine has all of the four criteria present)
It takes practice, and sometimes we disagree, but never by very much. And that’s as far as I’m willing to go when it comes to judging wines.