The Pros & Cons of Wine Scores | Reacting to @KonstantinBaumMasterofWine

Tasting notes allow you to be wishy-washy while a score is a firm commitment. Hello, hello, hello. Welcome back to Exotic Wine Travel, coming at you with another reactions video. I'm gonna react to Konstantin Baum. He's a master of wine in Germany. Hi, my name is Konstantin Baum. I'm a master of wine. And he discusses wine scores, a really divisive topic in the wine world. I'm gonna react to some of his opinions and then also make this useful, how you can actually use wine scores to make and drive buying decisions. There are so few good quality wine YouTube channels out there. I like Konstantin's channel. He provides some good stuff. Obviously, he's a master of wine, so he has some credibility. Let's see what he has to say about wine scores. Wine scores are widely criticized in the world of wine. Even people I really respect hate them. My parting comments. I think the 100-point scale really sucks. It's horrible. It's nasty. It's childish. And we shouldn't really be using it. So he uses a clip from Jamie Good from the Wine Anorak. I respect Jamie a lot. Does a lot of work. Works really, really hard. Knows his stuff when it comes to wine. I don't know why the 100-point scale is childish. If the 100-point scale isn't that good, what's the better alternative? I don't think that anybody's actually come up with a better alternative yet. Wine is complicated. Wine is a complicated product, and it's difficult to communicate efficiently about its quality. A score makes it easy to understand which wines were the best ones in the tasting. You don't even have to understand the language in order to understand what the quality of a certain wine is. You can also add scores to websites and catalogs of wine merchants pretty easily and sort by them. Scores simplify wine so much. When I was learning about wine, I didn't know, I knew jack. I didn't know anything. My parents weren't wine drinkers. I didn't know about all this stuff. I didn't even know about the different grape varieties and what were the differences. But you know what? I could see a score in a magazine, and that could give me an idea of, it's 190 points, it must be good. So it did help guide me in terms of tasting and learning. So I think, for me at least, scores have been a good thing. I like that Konstantin points out that scoring in terms of wines, vineyards, is not necessarily a new thing. Even though we often talk about wine ratings as if they were a pretty recent phenomenon, they have been around for a long time. People have been rating vineyards for centuries. The Marquis of Pombal, for example, established a system to rate the vineyards used for the port production in the mid-18th century. In Champagne, all villages are rated in the Echelle de Cru system between 80 and 100%. The lowest rung is rated between 80 and 89%. The premier Cru villages are rated 90 to 99, and the Grand Cru villages are rated 100%. I didn't know that about Champagne. I didn't know how they actually scored the actual Crus. Good stuff, interesting stuff, Konstantin. We all know the Bordeaux classification of 1855, where Chateaus are rated in five different categories, and we also know the Burgundy. Here's the thing, Konstantin, I know you know this because you're a master of wine. I'm surprised he brings up the Bordeaux classifications of 1855. Those classifications were not made by quality. Those were made by price. The first growths were the most expensive. That's why they're quote-unquote, that's why they were classified as the first growths. Okay, let's move on to see what he says more about scores and Mr. Robert Parker himself. Rating wine, however, was taken to a totally different level when one person entered the scene, Robert Parker. Robert Parker was a lawyer and became the most influential wine critic in the world. He started his publication, The Wine Advocate, in 1978, and in addition to writing articles and tasting notes about the wines, he also added a score to every one of those wines. Robert Parker introduced the 100-point scale that is today the international standard for rating wines. Like him or loathe him, Robert Parker had a huge influence on wine, the industry, and wine criticism. He introduced a lot of different regions to the American consumer. Whether you care or not, American consumption drives a lot of fine wine regions, actually. So the scale doesn't start at zero, it starts at 50 instead for an unacceptable wine. It goes up to 100 points for a perfect wine. A wine with 70 to 79 points is average. A wine with 80 to 89 points is above average to very good. And a wine with 90 to 100 points is outstanding to extraordinary. Yeah, a lot of people don't realize when the 100-point scale, it's not really 100 points as Constantine talks about, it starts at 50. When I go through wine regions like old wineries in Italy or France sometimes, it's so funny that you see them with posters up bragging about an 80-point score, even a low 80-point score, completely unheard of today. Oh, how the world of wines change. You never really see scores published if they're not above 90 points, and we'll talk about that in a little bit. I personally find the 100-point scale very useful. If you taste a lot of wines, your tasting notes become a little bit repetitive and a little bit meaningless. If you have to put a score to each and every wine, it really forces you to think about the quality of the wine in relation to all of the other wines that you've tasted before. Tasting notes allow you to be wishy-washy, while a score is a firm commitment. This is a point, if you read my stuff or if you've seen my videos, that I also agree with wholeheartedly. I have a lot of conversations with this with other master wines, other writers that hate scoring. I hate the argument that people say, oh, you should be able to tell the wine's quality by the tasting notes. I've read a lot of tasting notes where I just, I can't even tell if the writer, if the taster even likes the wine or not. Scores are an imperfect world, but at least it tells me that somebody put their butt on the line, made a firm judgment about the quality of the wine. When I read writing about wine, not just social media, when I'm reading it on the web or on publications, I want to see a score. I'd love to hear your thoughts on wine scores. Leave it in the comments below. And while you're at it, why don't you subscribe to the YouTube channel and click the bell so you know when new videos come out. So I agree with Konstantin, wine scores are useful, but they come with problems as well. So wine scores are really useful, but there are obviously also problems with wine scores. For one, they imply a precision that is simply not there. I can give a wine 94 points today and might score 95 points next week. That said, I don't think that I would score the same wine 85 points the week after. That is a problem. I see this happen all the time. Not only when you're tasting wine, whatever state of mind you are in or however long the wine was open. I've seen it a lot. The same wine that I tasted eight months ago, a year ago, maybe even a couple years ago, tastes different now than it did back then. There's a number of factors. Wine is always changing. Your palate's changing. Your neurology is changing. The atmosphere may have changed. There are so many different factors that affect it, but I do agree with Konstantin. I don't know if myself, if I scored a wine 92 points now, I doubt back then I would have scored it 79 points. When I retaste wines that I had already tasted, I love looking back on scores and seeing what I scored it before. It's a very useful exercise to sharpen your palate. There are other problems with scores as well too. The other problem is the inflation of scores. Wines are obviously getting better and better, but scores are also getting higher and higher. Some of that is not just due to the quality of the wines. There's a certain incentive for journalists to score wines a little bit higher because if you have the highest score on a popular wine, you're more likely to appear in the media or in catalogs from wine merchants. You all know which wine critics I'm talking about. Here's the thing about the wine industry. It's really tightly knit. It's really closely connected. As Constantine talks about, yes, there are lots of incentives for people to have high scores so they can keep getting invited to tastings, keep getting invited to trips, keep getting sent wine samples so they can taste more. It's difficult. That's why I respect Parker, especially in the old days. He always paid his way. A lot of people see this. A lot of people in the wine industry say this, but they're afraid to actually maybe say something or they don't wanna say something because your reputation can be shattered or word gets around really quickly. He talked about, you all know what critics we're talking about. You all know which wine critics I'm talking about. Maybe you don't know. Here's just my opinion. A lot of people like to poo-poo on James Suckling. If you look at his scores, he's got a lot of 90-point scores and to me, yes, it seems like almost everybody gets 90 points but I see that when he starts to score in the high range, the 93, 94, 95 points and above, I feel that he's pretty great. The wines are pretty darn exceptional. If they're in the 90 to 91, 92 range, I usually have to subtract two points. That gives me the real score in my head in terms of my scoring system. So I still find it useful. I still use it as a guide. You have other famous critics like Jancis Robinson who scores on the 20-point scale. I'm sorry. I know Jancis is incredibly influential. She's always been very cordial, very nice to me. I do not get the 20-point system at all. I see a lot of wines that I felt like were very poor get 15, 15.5 out of 20. It seems like every wine gets 15, 15.5 out of 20 on that scale. So really, it gives me no clue whether the wine is good or not. Earlier in the video, we saw Jamie Good of the Wine Anorak. I read his writing. He knows what he's talking about. He's tasted a lot. I do find, for me, his scores are a little bit high. I usually subtract about two, three points, maybe even a little bit more. That's just my opinion. Sorry, Jamie. For me, Decanter is the magazine that I trust the least. Decanter has mashed up their writing with their competition scores. In the Decanter competitions, I don't judge at the Decanter competitions, but I do judge at different wine competitions where scores are inflated. I think in Decanter, you have to get 95 points to get a gold medal. I think 97 points is a platinum medal. If somebody's a judge, they can correct me. But that's carried over to the normal wine writing. You see a lot of wines, I've seen a lot of wines on the website get 95 points that I think are not even close to that caliber when you're talking about stuff worldwide. I also don't like when I'm reading Decanter, I don't know who the tasters are because it changes so often. It doesn't seem to me like there's much of a calibration. And this is not an American versus British thing, I promise. Personally, the sites that carry a lot of weight with me are still the Wine Advocate, Robert Parker's website. There's a handful of reviewers, and at least I can know their taste, know their style. Maybe the scores crept up a little bit. I think Wine Spectator, the scores are pretty good because they taste blind, I know. And the scores are generally a little bit lower. The problem is I'd like to see a more vast coverage. Venice is my all-time favorite, Venice.com, Antonio Galoni's site. I really like a lot of the critics there. And the Venice Forum is the coolest place in terms of if you wanna exchange wine knowledge, learn about wine. I think that's my favorite place to hang out on the internet if you wanna know more about wine. But this is hardcore geek stuff. Finally, I think this is how you can use scores to your benefit. I would recommend rating wines yourself and then comparing those scores to wine critics. If you agree with them, then follow their advice next time. But also look back at your scores when you retaste the wine in order to see how reliable your assessment of quality was. I do that all the time. Early on when I started in wine, I did it out of insecurity. I wanted to taste wines. Then I'd look up, I subscribed to a lot of different critics' websites, see if they tasted the wine, see what their scores were, see where things matched up. These days, I'm a little bit more secure with my palate, but I still like to check to see where opinions are because no matter the taster, sometimes you miss things. Sometimes you might be having a bad day, who knows. If you're really getting into wine, taste it, decide what the score is in your head, and then look at a critic's website. If you find somebody that you trust, maybe you follow them. Maybe you're just using Vivino, which I'm very active on. You can see my account up there. I've generally found that if wines have over 100 ratings and they score about 4.2 out of five, because that's how Vivino rates, I generally feel like those are 90-point type wines. I think anything that's in the high threes, and then obviously anything in the fours, is pretty darn good. I know a lot of people poo-poo on Vivino, but I'm a big advocate. I think it gives the power back to you, the consumer. It helps you drink more wine. It helps everybody drink more wine, and that's what we all want. So what site, what critic, what application do you use for wine scores, or help guide your buying decisions? I would love to know. And if you're thinking about what video to watch next, check out my reactions to Wine King, the biggest wine YouTuber on the platform. I'll drop that right there.