What's in a SCORE?

Scores rule. Or do they? Nothing in the wine world fuels debate and controversy quite like the subject of scoring

- ANDREW JEFFORD

Wine was once scoreless. My 1973 Penguin version of Edmund Penning-Rowsell’s The Wines of Bordeaux brims with figures – most of them for vintages and the tonneaux of wine produced at individual châteaux in those years. The author has clearly tasted and drunk a wealth of fine Bordeaux, distinguishes château styles in a general sense and makes qualitative assessments – but never pins the butterfly to the wheel with a score. PenningRowsell’s clubby, discursive assessments follow the model laid down by one-time Guardian journalist, essayist and Edinburgh professor of rhetoric George Saintsbury in his 1920 Notes on a Cellar-Book, written in retirement in Bath.

By the late 1970s, though, change was afoot. From September 1952 onwards, a young wine trade recruit called Michael Broadbent began taking ‘handwritten tasting notes, in excess of 85,000, in small, identical red books – 133 to date’ (as he wrote in the introduction to Vintage Wine in 2002). Broadbent came to use what he called a ‘“broad-brush” five star rating system’ – which, since no stars equated to ‘Poor’, could be construed as a six-point scale.

Hugh Johnson, a persistent critic of 100-point scale scores, also adopted a one- to four-star system for ‘general quality standing’ in his Pocket Wine Book (the 2022 45th edition £12.99, Octopus), with the stars appearing in red for ‘good value in its class’. Decanter magazine, founded in 1975, employed a 20-point scale for its tastings from the off: the norm for its day, and used by pioneer European critics such as Clive Coates MW and France’s Michel Bettane.