Echinosum
Posts: 604
Joined: 1/28/2021 From: Buckinghamshire, UK Status: offline
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quote:
ORIGINAL: fanglangzhe So here is the official CT scoring guide: Score Meaning 98-100 Extraordinary 94-97 Outstanding 90-93 Excellent 86-89 Very Good 80-85 Good 70-79 Below/Average 50-69 Avoid In reality, I think the way most of us score is closer to this: 50-79 Avoid 80-84 Below Average 85-87 Average 88-89 Above Average/Good 90-93 Great 94-100 Outstanding to Extraordinary What's "average"? Average over what range? We all know about the politicians worrying that about half of schoolstudents are doing worse than average, and promising the education system must improve so that many more are better than average. Wine-making has got a lot better over the decades. Are these scores absolute standards, or should we expect a 90-point wine in 2021 to be a lot better than a 90-pt wine in 1990 to account for that improvement? The Rioja regulatory council thinks like that and their official vintage ratings show that every vintage has been better than "normal" since 1984, and better than "medium" since 1972. Though I wonder which is worse, medium or normal. No vintage has ever been worse than medium or normal, and there are very few of those. So I'm afraid I can't really distinguish your two scales, because I don't know what you think "average" is supposed to be. Or "good". One idea might be that "average" means the quality you'd typically expect of the average priced bottle of wine sold. I believe the average price of a bottle of wine sold in Britain is about between £6.00 and £6.50. That's only 20%-30% more than the cost of a basic bottles of wine at about £5, or perhaps a notch less, remembering that there's about £2.25 duty on wine. So if a typical bottle of £6.50 wine is the standard of an "average" wine, that's pretty horrible by my estimation. If that's the original CT 80-point wine, then I go nowhere near there and know very little about how to score wines in the vicinity of 80 points. I'd give an 85 to the standard I'd expect of a typical supermarket wine at about twice the basic price, or about £10,00. But £10 like you'd get from Chile or New Zealand or Portugal or Spain, not £10.00 like you'd get from France or some posh growing area, which can be pretty horrible still. Then for 90, I expect a complete wine. It is has a full and complex nose. It is balanced. It is reasonably concentrated. The palate is interesting, and lacks any hollow or weak spots. It has length. This is what I deduce of the kind of wine people give 90 to. In Bordeaux, it is a standard only the best Cru Bourgeois reach (and sometimes exceed) in good vintages. That would be a nice bottle, and a lot of my everyday drinking falls a little short of that. But not very much short, and so I rarely get much lower than about 87 in my marking. I don't necessarily find what I am doing different from the orginal CT idea. So it all depends what you think is "average" or "good". It also depends whether "average" is an absolute or relative standard over the years.
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