*** This page has been superceded by a technically superior system of emoticon scoring

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Ahhhh don’t really dig the wine scoring system that the experts use.  The principal complaint is that it is redolent of grade inflation at Harvard.  Try finding a review for a wine that didn’t score at least 85 points!  In defence of the system, published wine reviews are somewhat self-selecting:  who is going to search out a 70-point wine?  Recognizing his low place on the totem pole, catchpeter has adopted his nose to the academic scale.  Robert Parker describes it rather well.  To get a gut feeling for what the score means, you just have to think (back a few years perhaps to) how you’d feel if your college prof. returned a test with a __ on it.  Feel good?  Right.  But still you should wonder, “what does it all mean, Basel?”  Yer on yer own from there.

20 Feb 2009: It has dawned on me that I have been tending to score wines less on raw merit, but rather on a scale of merit relative to price (M/E).  This introduces all sorts of complications with normalization and I don’t yet have answers to that.

22 Feb 2009: The Chateau Dassault provides a test case of my new rating schema.  On its own, I’d probably have said 91 pts.  It is a fabulous wine.  But relative to the purchase price I have been happier…