Wine's most familiar rating scale has never used the range it advertises. Nothing gets published below fifty, because fifty is where the scale was designed to begin, and in practice almost nothing gets published in the lower reaches above it either. What looks like a wide and precise instrument turns out to be a narrow one with a long decorative tail.
Robert Parker set it up that way on purpose. His newsletter launched in 1978 for American readers who had grown up with school report cards, where fifty is a fail and ninety is an A. Nobody had to have the system explained to them, which is why it spread so fast. It also imported the report-card reflex that anything short of ninety is a disappointment.
Critics do not share the same working band, either. Across the ratings in Femente's graph, the median Wine Spectator score is 88 and the median Decanter score is 92. Neither publication is being harsher or softer about wine in general; they have simply parked their range in a different place. A number that reads as comfortably above average from one reviewer reads as unremarkable from the other, and nothing on a shelf tag tells you which one you are looking at.
Bordeaux
Economists have measured what that crowding does to money. Hedonic analysis of a very large set of Wine Spectator reviews found that price premiums show up only once a wine clears ninety points, and that wines rated anywhere from the bottom of the scale up to that line sell for broadly the same. One point of movement at the threshold is worth more than forty points of movement below it, which explains why the industry treats a single number as a commercial event.
Reading a score usefully starts with reading the critic. Two numbers from the same reviewer, tasting the same kind of wine, tell you something real about which bottle they preferred. A number from one publication set against a number from another tells you very little, and either one set against the idea of a hundred-point scale tells you less again. Find a critic whose palate you have tested against your own, then treat the number as their handwriting rather than as a measurement.
