Compromises are for relationships, not wine.

- Sir Robert Scott Caywood

Wine ratings are a necessary evil.  If that means I am a purveyor of evil, then so be it.  Critics love to give recommendations, customers want recommendations, and sizing up a wine by a tidy score (not unlike our grade-school assignments) is arguably the fastest appraisal method.

The 20-point, 100-point, and 5-star scales are probably the most common types you’ll find in your day-to-day reading.  The LCBO has a great primer article on how to navigate through the various adjudications you may come across.   It lacks an explanation for here, however.

Writersblanc.ca uses a 10-point scale which hybridizes the 100-point and 5-star methods.  I find the x/100 scores too objective and prescription-like.  Though the 5-stars refer to different quality-categories, I end up associating 4 stars with 80%, 4.5 with 90%, and 5 with 100%.

The 10-point system moves in full and half points, allowing for nuance while retaining a healthy amount of abstraction.  It’s pretty darned close to Arts majors’ essay-grading, where an A- to A+ incorporates the 80-90 percents; B- to B+ are 70-79 percents; and so on down the line.  It’s tough to crack the glass ceiling, but if you do… oh it’s special.

And of course, on such a namely site it’s only appropriate that we use our words.  I may go ga-ga for a bottle, or I could cower in fear from it.  Those reactions should be gleaned from the tasting notes.  Even if I don’t like all wine styles, I’ll try my best to find the good in every bottle while calling out plonk.  Also, I firmly believe in allusions and metaphors extending into wine.  It isn’t silly if it’s inspirational; if anything, it helps define real character.

Wines will be evaluated along the following lines:

- is the wine a good representation of the grape and region? does it over/underachieve?

- is the wine complex and have good depth?  (even simpler wines can have good depth)

- are the major factors of alcohol, acid and fruit in balance, or does one stand out in a negative way?

- does the wine get me excited?  is it something worth seeking out?

- is the wine a human or a parrot?  does it say many things or repeat just one?

- is it free of fault, or at least free of uncomplimentary fault?

Points explained:

10 Grapes:  Classic.  Best of the best and can’t get much better.  In all likelihood, these bottles escape the price-range of the staff here.  But: for the days we decide to go into debt, or run into wealthy friends who went into business instead of Grad School, we’ll happily be prepared to break out this rating.

9.5 Grapes:  The best stuff.  Purely indicative of varietal character, local/regional/historical style, or (foregoing all that), just go above and beyond the expectations of the lay-drinker.

9 Grapes:  Excellent, excellent wine.  This includes wines with good-great potential down the road, short-term drinkers which deliver complexity beyond their years (imagine Condrieu, and you), and any myriad of factors that imply you shouldn’t miss these types of quality bottles.

8.5 Grapes:  Great wine.  It hits the grading marks, provides decent value, and makes you smile thinking about the extra bottles you have in the cellar (even if you didn’t pair it perfectly the first time and quietly fear disappointing your partner at the next dinner party).

8 Grapes:  Very good to great wine.  Sure, it doesn’t set the world on fire, but it does a darned good job.  Great typicity, fault-free, and a little cool/chic factor.  Showing my bias: it’s probably easier to get into this category if it’s an Old World-styled wine rather than New, but that’s only because more work probably went into it.  (This is where that personality-factor comes into play.)

7.5 Grapes:  The good stuff.  An above average bottle — more often than not, this is the bare minimum snobs require to be satisfied.

7 Grapes:  An intersection score.  Either a good wine that should have been more complex (either by bouquet, body, length, etc.), a simple wine that’s playing above its usual tune, or a fault-free wine that isn’t doing anything wrong but isn’t making you dance either.  B-range.

6.5 Grapes:  Jury’s out.  All told, it’s probably a good wine.  It might also be an underachieving wine, or a wine which is only a basic representation of a certain style.  You’d try it to say that you tried it, but are probably quietly bitter knowing there are better bottles out there.

6 Grapes: Not necessarily a bad wine, but there’s something holding it back.  Consider it drinkable if you’re cornered.

5.5 Grapes:  A wine to skip.  Could be faulted, boring, or straight-up tasteless.  Starter-wines which we’ve all tried, liked at the time, and in hindsight regretted.

5 Grapes and lower:  Gets the F-grade.  There’s a very good chance, for the sake of avoiding libel charges, that none of these wines will be reviewed.

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Hopefully that clears up how the tasting notes should operate here.  Oh, and lastly, while this is a Canadian site and many reviews will be of Canadian wine, all worthwhile international selections are fit for dissection.  We can be proud of our national wines, but if we as consumers can raise our standards by better understanding what else is available, then the industry as a whole should be better for it.

-JW