Wine reviews and point scoring

I wrote a piece a while ago arguing that a 10-point system was more than adequate to score wines 99% of the time. It went something like this: Check Halliday’s scores, or those of the Winefront or Huon Hooke or Tyson Stelzer, and you’ll rarely see wines that score less than 87 points or more than 96 points. Any wines outside that range are either pretty ordinary or bloody brilliant.

However, since the whole idea of this wine website is about keeping things simple, we’re going to follow suit and use roughly the same system. A quick refresher on what the scores mean:

· 95 – 100 Gold – Outstanding

· 91 – 94 Silver – Good to very good

· 87 – 90 Bronze – Decent

· 86 and under – unexciting

In practice, scores much lower than 90 will not excite most consumers or wine writers. Huon Hooke is the exception, at times listing bargains of the week with points scores as low as 85.

How we select wines for tasting

Our normal process is to search the Winefront’s reviews, along with James Halliday’s, Huon Hooke’s and Tyson Stelzer’s, for wines that rate over 90 points and cost less than $25. That’s our sweet spot, so to speak. When we find a sub $25 wine rated at 96 points, we’ll jump on it. A recent example was Evans & Tate Metricup Road Cabernet Merlot 2011, which Winestar offered for $16. Too good to be true? Yes, Halliday gave it 96, but we rated it 4-5 points lower – still makes it worth considering but less of a bargain.

We rate the E & T Chardonnay 2011 under the same label at 93 so we have ourselves a bargain there at $16. Hoddles Creek Pinot Noir 2012 gets 92+ from the guys at Winefront, and sells for $19, which makes it another good deal. We rate it at 93. Mattinson, Walsh and Bennie are typically 2-3 points tougher than Halliday, and usually pretty close to our scores. They rate the 2011 Trinders at 93, we gave it 94. Good buy at $20 from Kemenys for a time. Same with the Fraser Gallop 2011 Chardy in the photo: 92 from Winefront, 93 from us, $18 at Wineonline.We look for more than perfect scores, of course. We look for wines that also express the character of their origins and varieties – we don’t want much for $20, do we? At the risk of sounding like a broken record, that’s the beauty of the wine business: you can find all these things when you look hard enough.