What The 100-Point Wine Scoring System Actually Means

When a person is deciding what beverage to pair with their perfectly prepared meal, wine is often the first drink that comes to mind. However, though the meal's flavor profile will be a decent starting point when making the decision, if you don't have a preference for a particular varietal, choosing vino can be vexing.

You should absolutely taste wines for yourself before judging, but thanks to the work of writer Robert Parker, a wine reviewer in the 1970s, you now have a shorthand to fall back on. Parker pioneered a 100-point scoring system to classify wine, and the scale has become standard in the wine world. But before you run to the liquor store, you should know that Parker's system can't find the world's most perfect bottle of wine. Instead, it identifies the qualities inherent to a particular wine's flavor profile and scores a bottle against the idealized iteration of the vintage.

If you're a fledgling winemaker and find the prospect of subjecting your bottle to a 100-point evaluation, you can at least find some comfort in the fact that the assessment never scores a wine lower than 50. Moreover, most bottles end up in the upper 80s (80-89 being "barely above average to very good"), which means that the average score awarded to a wine on the scale winds up somewhere between 87 and 89 (90-95 is classed as "outstanding," anything above that is "extraordinary").

It can be difficult to understand how reviewers critique wine using this system, but it makes more sense if you imagine your wine is a show dog. In dog shows, the prize pups are the ones that are most in line with a strict set of breed standards. Similarly, the highest-scoring wines are directly compared to the best possible expressions of a specific variety of grape. Often, a variable such as climate can affect a wine's score. For example, the climate conditions in 2018 were conducive to growing grapes, and that year gave us numerous Californian bottles that were assigned particularly high scores.

The present state of the 100-point wine scoring scale is a far cry from what Robert Parker intended. When he started putting a number on wines, he also reinvigorated the art of wine reviewing. While most reviews gave general descriptions of a wine that centered around intangible qualities like its personality, Parker made specific reference to the fruits that went into a bottle of wine, even going so far as to pick out which particular breeds of fruit were mimicked by its flavor.

It should be noted that the 100-point scoring system that wine is subjected to today, while it was invented by Parker, is different from what he had imagined. Fewer wines fall below a score of 80 than ever before, but under Parker's original plan, wines of mid-level quality would be categorized in the 70s, and a bottle that earned a score above 90 was exceptional. While this scoring system can provide a useful shortcut for finding great wine, you should be aware of how scores have inflated over time, and make sure to look past the number and familiarize yourself with a wine's flavor before you buy a bottle. You also need to note that the wine community is not unanimously in support of Parker's work. In the 2013 film "Escaping Robert Parker," winemakers on both sides of the spectrum – both for and against the scoring system — debate the merits of this more modern facet of wine writing.