A score compares one bottle to other bottles in the same category, judged by someone who tasted eighty wines that morning. It is a useful signal for a collector choosing between two Bordeaux. It is close to useless for deciding what to open on a Tuesday, because it never asks what you are eating, who is coming, or whether you wanted a big wine at all. The score answers a question most people are not asking.
How a score is actually produced
A critic tastes in flights — often dozens of wines in a session, frequently blind, usually young, and almost always without food.
Every part of that shapes the result.
Volume. Attention is finite. A wine tasted fortieth is not being met by the same palate as the wine tasted fourth.
Youth. Wines are scored on release, long before most of them are at their best, which means the score is partly a forecast.
No food. This is the big one. Tasted alone, wines that make an impression win. Wines built to sit beside dinner — leaner, higher in acidity, quieter — are precisely the wines that show least well in a room with no food in it.
None of this is a scandal. It is simply what the method is good at and what it is not.
What a score is genuinely good for
Comparing like with like at the top of the market. If you are choosing between two producers in the same appellation and the same vintage, and you plan to keep the bottle for a decade, a trusted critic's score carries real information.
It is also a reasonable filter against outright failure. Very low scores usually mean something went wrong.
Between those two uses — high-end comparison and disaster avoidance — there is a wide middle where the number tells you very little.
The category problem
Here is the part that gets skipped: 93 points compared to what?
A score is relative to a category the critic has in mind. A 93-point Napa Cabernet and a 93-point Chablis are not being measured on the same axis, and neither is telling you whether you wanted Cabernet or Chablis tonight. The number looks absolute and is not.
So a score can tell you a wine is a good example of its type. It cannot tell you whether its type is right for your table, your food, or your evening — which is almost always the actual question.
Why the scale is narrower than it looks
The hundred-point scale is not a hundred points. In practice, wines in shops occupy a band from the mid-eighties to the high nineties. Below that, wines tend not to be reviewed at all.
Which means the difference between 88 and 92 is doing enormous work in a customer's mind while representing a narrow slice of judgement — one that different critics, or the same critic on a different morning, would draw differently.
Retailers know this. That is why shelf talkers show 90+ and rarely anything else.
What to use instead
The producer. A family that has farmed the same ground for generations is a more durable signal than a number attached to one vintage. They are not going to wreck their name for a year's margin.
The place, narrowly stated. A specific appellation means the wine had to come from somewhere in particular. A state or a country means it did not.
Somebody's actual recommendation. A person who knows what you eat and how you drink outperforms a critic who knows neither. A wine shop where someone asks what you are cooking is worth more than a wall of 92s.
What it is for. "What am I doing tonight" is a better filter than "what is the best wine in this price band," because the second question has no answer without the first.
Where we stand
We do not publish scores and we do not chase them, and it is fair to say that is self-serving — so here is the reasoning rather than the slogan.
A score ranks bottles inside a category. THIS ONE works the other way around: we start with the grape that goes with what people actually eat, compare every region that grows it, and keep one family estate. The comparison happens before the bottle exists, not after it is poured for a critic.
That method cannot produce a number, and it is not trying to. It is trying to produce one bottle you can hand someone without a caveat. The four steps are here, and the longer argument is here.
The short version
Scores are a tool for comparing similar wines at the top of the market. They are not a shopping list, they are not absolute, and the scale is narrower than it appears. If you only remember one thing: a score tells you how a wine performed alone in a room. You are going to drink it with dinner.
How we choose instead: four steps, one bottle per grape.