I’m often asked what my scores out of 100 mean relative to those of other critics, so here’s an explanation.
The one consistent aspect of most scoring systems is that they tend to push scores up towards the top end. There is still no universal system by which critics apply scores out of 100 to wine. It’s an obvious untruth that the 100-point system is a system that rates wine with 100 possible levels.
Most Australian critics tend to commence with scores around 89 and mark all wines up to 99 or 100, making it for them at least a 12-point scale. The scores regularly given wines by some critics would suggest they’re operating on even a narrower range than that.
I tend to operate on a much wider scale, and I’ll dip low into the 70s if a wine’s lack of quality demands I do so.
However, when I rate wine, I still score wine using the 20-point scale, although I do it differently. I can’t bring myself to think in terms of the 100-point scale, which for most people delivers anything but a straight line when matching wines with quality. This site presents both my scores.
Marking out of 20, I use the entire decimal point, so I might rate a wine in this scale with scores like 14.7 or 18.3 for instance. This opens up the field of possibilities immensely, giving me a potential 54 gradations of score between 14.5 and 19.8. Anything above that is rather rare indeed – from my perspective at least.
I don’t claim to be 100% statistically perfect here, since I would not expect to give the same wine precisely the same score in different circumstances of environment, storage, cork quality or whatever. However this approach gives me room to be more expressive and communicative, which is what I believe the role of the critic to be.
When I was figuring a way to convert my scores from 20 into a score from 100, I was grateful that James Halliday cooperated to ensure that we were both using sufficiently similar logic to ensure that our readers and subscribers could reliably compare our ratings. This was some time ago however, and I believe that James and I are now operating on entirely different scales for most wines. Most Australian wine critics are also giving significantly higher scores out of 100 than I do to Australian wines.
Here is a detailed explanation of my scoring system, how I convert scores out of 20 to 100, and how these theoretically at least relate to awards in Australian wine shows.
95+ Outstanding wines of exceptional quality; either classic representations of their style or variety, or cutting-edge wines at the very sharp end of wine innovation. Roughly equivalent to a solid Gold Medal (18.6) and above.
90–94 Highly recommended. Wines of genuine class and character. Pretty well covers the gamut of Silver Medal (17.0 to 18.5).
87–89 Recommended. Certainly above average quality, without faults that interfere beyond a base level of enhancing complexity, able to make a quality statement about variety, technique or region. Solid Bronze Medal (16.0 to 16.9).
84–86 Reasonably good wine, but lacking genuine distinction and class. Should be free of technical faults. Relatively uncomplicated and straightforward, comprising the better examples of cheap wine (sub $15). Just above and below Bronze Medal status (15.3 to 15.9).
80–83 Everyday wines, possibly with some technical deficiency, hopefully at the cheaper end of the pricing scale (14.5 to 15.2).
75–79 Something went wrong. Possessing a significant flaw, often through a viticultural or winemaking misfortune.
It is worth noting that wines scoring an average of 15.5 out of 20 in Australian wine shows are awarded a Bronze Medal; those that score 17 are awarded Silver Medals; and those that score 18.5 are awarded Gold.
