Wine Ratings
I have been neglecting the cultural side of this blog for awhile, and thought it was time to post something to try to even the scales. So when I heard a story on NPR yesterday morning about wine ratings, I figured that was it. Yesterday, however, I had other things to rant about. So, today I tracked down a link to the NPR story. You can listen to an archived version here.
The basic point of the story was that numerical wine ratings are a fairly new invention. In the decade or so they’ve been in use, consumers (not surprisingly) have adjusted their buying habits to reflect the ratings. However, the ratings are not as objective as you might think. Ratings are determined by an individual who is assigned a specific wine region. So the 93-rated Cabernet Sauvignon from California that Wine Spectator says is a great deal was tasted and rated by only one person. You can see how ratings are apt to be skewed by the preferences and palates of a few people. Wine makers lament that the rating systems limit the range of wines being made because you have to make a certain kind of wine to get the right rating. Wine sellers have also been known to mislead consumers by posting inaccurate shelf tags under wines. To get a bit more information about the different numerical ratings available check out this site.
The Wine Ratings by SharedThought, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.