Drinking by numbers

Scoring wines is all the rage, but one person's 97 is another's 79, so take your time and think for yourself

The world of wine is being colonised by numbers. I'm not talking about things like alcohol by volume or even price tags here, though both are increasingly important these days. No, sir, the numbers I have in mind are scores out of 100. Visit an American wine shop and the shelves are covered in figures: 92s, 93s and the occasional 95 or higher. You might find something with an 85 attached to it, but unless it's cheap, it will almost certainly be covered in dust.

Scores are the work of American wine critics, ex cathedra pronouncements from the spittoons of the Fourth Estate. To say that they can make or break a winery is an understatement. Put bluntly, wines that score well sell well, irrespective of what they taste like. Wines that score badly (and in a culture which values success, that means anything below 90 points) are bin ends waiting to happen.

There's nothing wrong with using a score to classify a wine. When I'm writing my own notes, I use a mark out of 20, with a baroque and highly personal series of pluses, minuses, question marks and acronyms. The problem starts when consumers take numbers too seriously - and, far worse, when they cease to believe the evidence of their own tastebuds. One of my favourite American cartoons shows a bloke tasting in a wine shop. 'This is repulsive,' he tells the guy behind the counter. 'It scored a 94,' comes the reply. 'OK, I'll take two cases,' says the consumer.

Scores, like tasting notes, are highly subjective. They are not scientific; more to the point, they are not repeatable. Even experienced wine tasters are inconsistent in their scoring. Something that gets an 88 today could easily notch up a 93 tomorrow. Wines change over time, and so do tasters. Mood and atmosphere can have a huge impact on our appreciation of a given bottle. Try sampling a range of tannic reds when you've got a hangover or it's a humid, muggy day, and you'll see what I mean.

Could scores catch on over here? Most British wine hacks prefer words to numbers, but wine merchants are starting to use American scores with worrying frequency. It's easy to see why - giving something a numerical rating makes it easier to classify, which is why scores are so popular with wine collectors and bottle strokers. 'My cellar contains nothing with a score below 90,' one such individual told me recently. Perhaps he's a friend of the man I saw dining in a top French restaurant openly checking the wine list against scores he'd stored in his palmtop computer.

I think we're missing the point here. A huge part of the pleasure of wine is its diversity and slippery subjectivity. We all enjoy different styles of wine and have different ways of describing them. As a journalist, I do my best to share my enthusiasms with you, but no one's forcing you to agree with them. In America, the implication is that if you don't like a high-scoring wine, there's something wrong with your palate.

Scores are a short cut, developed in a country where time is at a premium, and an expensive one at that. They eschew minor roads, country lanes and cul-de-sacs in favour of the five-lane motorway, where speed is an end in itself. You may not agree, but scores remind me of a man I once overheard in the Louvre. 'Where's the Mona Lisa ?' he asked a guide, with a breathless, 'I'm double-parked.'