It’s A Wine-derful Life By David W. Brown One night, I grabbed drinks with a friend who judges major wine competitions in Europe. In passing, I commented that wine ratings were absurd, and that no one could seriously tell the difference between a 97-point and a 98-point wine. She looked at me aghast, as though I had uttered some unspeakable heresy. Of course she could tell the difference between the two, she said, and rattled off a half-dozen differences between them. I never questioned the practice again.
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f you walk in unprepared, the wine section at your local Rouses Market can seem like a mysterious labyrinth. What you need to know is that the mystery is the best part. When you pull a cork from a bottle, you’re drinking a lot more than a mere beverage. Wine is perhaps the most intimately human product on store shelves. When you take a sip, you are drinking the decades and sometimes centuries of agriculture that enriched the vineyard’s soil; you are honoring the generations of farmers who worked tirelessly to know precisely the best grape variety to grow in their specific little patch of ground; and you are acknowledging the hard-won experience of winemakers who had to figure out the best way to fully express the uniqueness of their vineyard — its “terroir” — and house style as a winedrinking experience. There’s more. You’re drinking that year’s rain and sunlight and wind and frost. You’re even drinking the bureaucracy of the region: A wine from Champagne and one from the Loire Valley are made very differently, and with different grapes — and a lot of French lawyers and voters keep it that way. You are drinking what different places value as a culture. In other words, when you buy a bottle of wine, it’s not just something to drink with dinner. You’re buying the cheapest international vacation you’ve ever taken, and you’re flying first class. When spending your hard-earned cash, though, sometimes you don’t want a risky proposition. You want a sure thing. Enter the wine rating: highlighted on Rouses shelves, or emblazoned on wine labels.
“It’s a great way for customers to narrow down the selection of what they are looking at, to what they may or may not want to invest in,” says Julie Joy, the Director of Beer, Wine, and Spirits for Rouses Markets. When looking at a bottle, she continued, “a 90 to 95 would be considered outstanding — more complex in character, and terrific to drink. A 96 to 100 — which you don’t see very often — would be extraordinary.” There’s even a little bit of humor to be found. The prolific wine critic and writer Robert Parker famously rated wines on a scale from 50 to 100. A liquid gets 50 points just for being wine. Parker had perhaps the most influential career of any wine critic ever, and was most responsible for popularizing the 100-point scale in the 1980s. He retired four years ago, but his publication, Wine Advocate,
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