Leafing through my notes today, I found a wine scoring system I had made up 2-3 years ago, and thought - why not share it here? Hope at least one person finds it useful, or food for thought. It is a 10 point system:
0 - Not wine. Doesn't mean it is bad. Water has score 0.1 - No longer wine. Again, doesn't mean it's bad. Vinegar has score 1, as well as stuff in ancient amphorae they recover from the seabed.
2 - Undrinkable wine. Badly damaged by heat, starting to turn into vinegar, etc. No redeeming qualities.3 - Barely drinkable wine. Exhibits defects in most or all of its features (acidity, sugars, flavor etc.) and their combination. Can be drunk only by very undiscerning persons, or winos. Bum wines belong here, as well as some batches of some jug or box wines.
4 - Flawed wines. Have at least one noticeable defect (too sweet, too sour, corked, and so on). Domain of the box and jug wines, some cheap bottle wines here too.5 - Quaffing wines. Have no noticeable defects, but no outstanding features either. Domain of the cheap to low-priced bottles; some box and jug wines belong here too.
6 - Average wines. Have no defects, and at least one noticeably good feature, or good combination of features.7 - Better wines. More than one feature noticeably good, but still some of the features (or the combination) is average.
8 - Good wines. All features are noticeably good, but nothing is exceptional.9 - Very good wines. Some of the features are exceptional, others could be better.
10 - Exceptional wine. Could not be better. All features exceptional.The numeric grades have (DaleW) letter grades and mnemonic correspondences.
1: F, fubar class. 2: E, eww class. 3: D, Dr Pepper class. 4, 5: C- and C, Coke class. 6, 7: B and B+, Bravo class 8, 9 and 10: A-, A and A+, Ahh class.The reason why I decided to have this system are clear, I hope - easy to grade, and attempting to be objective. It has only 4 decision points - flawed, neutral, good and exceptional, and the lowest decision dominates. It is, to me at least, a system where different scores represent real, and not imagined, or controversial difference. After all, more often than not, the difference between e.g. 82 and 86 point wines (in traditional wine mag scoring) is imaginary, and might not be reproduced by the same graders on a different tasting. While for my system, each taster would give the same score to the same wine on different tastings (I hope :), while the scores on the same wine might still be different across tasters, but that's OK.