An important but difficult and controversial area is wine assessments and scoring of wines. The assessment itself must as far as possible be objective, but it is affected, in addition to the physical environment where the testing takes place, also by several factors. Examples of factors can be the personal taste that you must put aside, how long each wine is given to show its potential, the order of the wines in the tasting where for example a subtle wine can die completely if it comes after a muscle wine, if it is an open tasting, the “label” can affect and give a bias, etc. etc. In addition, the wine writer should find a description of the wine in general terms and not in overly imaginative terms.

As if all this is not enough, different organizations / wine writers use different score scales such as a 20-point or 100-point scale or a 5-star scale. You may also be wondering about these scales because points below 10 and 80, respectively, are rarely used, at least for wines that are of interest to us wine enthusiasts. One who made the 100-point scale known is Robert Parker.

One of my important sources of knowledge for following the general wine development in France and especially Provence is the prestigious magazine La Revue du Vin de France which is also Europe’s oldest in the field. The reputable newspaper has so far used the 20-point scale but has now made an adjustment to mainly the Anglo-Saxon markets and is now changing to the 100-point scale. Fortunately, La Revue du Vin de France has produced a translation table:

Source: La Revue du Vin de France