Stas, thanks for the interesting articles, always fun to see pictures and read thoughts of the holy land!
But as a statistician, my problem is with your numbers. To put it simply, wine scores are garbage.
Thank you Brady for taking the time and effort to express so eloquently what are also my reservations to the whole numbers game in wine.
As you say there are two issues here.
Firstly, who says what some qualities of wine are better than others (wood/no wood, stems/no stems)? In Kermit's eternal words: better for what? Yes wines do have faults and many "supermarket" wines can be easily eliminated as not that great, but by the time we make it to proper wine, made with care and love, by someone who has skill, the whole grading thing becomes ridiculous. Just one example: I would never again have a bottle of Gonon's white St Joseph, I simply couldn't care less, it is just not my thing. So on my 100 point scale that's a 50/100. On the other hand give me one of Vaudoisey's 1er Volnays from 2011, and if I'm in the right mood I'd think the lightness and elegance as well as length deserve a mid 90s score. But this is complete nonsense! Both are fantastic winemakers producing little miracles in a bottle, some people will like one, some the other, some both. Once we are in a quality environment, there is just no point in ranking these things.
Secondly, the idea that you can measure something as fluid and subjective as wine on a 5 point scale, let alone on a 100 point scale grates for me too. There seems to be some obsession with numbers in today's world. 91 must be better than 89, right? But as Brady says, this is pseudo-science. In my field there's a number 9dipole moment of the electron) whose accuracy we know to such high precision that it is equivalent to knowing the distance between NY and LA to within a hair-breadth, as someone famous once said. Countless experiments have verified it. In such a setting it makes sense to talk about numbers, sure, I'm all for it. But what is the kilogram equivalent for wine? How do you measure it? Can others repeat the experiment and get the same answer? Of course not! There's only one place I can see where scores are even vaguely useful: as a personal shorthand for what we think of a wine to compare for ourselves when next we taste the wine. And even that is a bit of long shot. The rest is just marketing bs and trying to sell wine or reviews.
Yes there is a lot to learn in wine, much of if is quite scientific, but reducing it all to a single number, really?
