Ninety points — from whom? That’s the question I put to every customer who shows me a score, because a number with no name attached settles nothing, however confidently it gets waved about the shop. Someone picks up a bottle, sees “92 points” on the shelf-talker, and treats it as fact rather than opinion. Here’s the plain truth: a wine rating is one taster’s score, on their own scale, meant to sum up quality in a glance — nothing more official than that. By the end of this you’ll know whose scores are worth leaning on, which are marketing dressed up as measurement, and how to read a number on a shelf without handing over your own judgement.
What is the best rating for wine?
There isn’t a single “best” rating — there’s the rating that matches your palate. The 100-point scale, pioneered by the American critic Robert Parker in the 1970s, is the industry heavyweight; Decanter’s 5-star system is the British alternative many of us grew up trusting instead.
Parker trained as a lawyer near Baltimore before he ever wrote about wine, and he built his Wine Advocate newsletter in 1978 out of frustration with criticism he thought too cosy with the trade. His 100-point idea borrowed straight from the American high-school grading system — out of 100, with 50 as the bottom mark. It stuck because it’s instantly readable: no context needed, just a number bigger than the one next to it.
But here’s the bit that took the trade years to say out loud: most scores cluster between 80 and 100, and the gap between an 89 and a 91 is often more about the critic’s mood on the day than any real difference in the glass. Producers know this. A wine with 89 points sells noticeably worse than one with 91 — even when tasters struggle to agree which is actually better. One Madeira specialist I know refuses to use the 100-point scale at all, arguing there’s no such thing as a perfect wine, so why pretend 100 is achievable.
What are the levels of wine rating?
The 100-point scale runs from a theoretical 50 (undrinkable) to 100 (perfect, rarely awarded), but almost all the real decision-making happens in the top third — anything below 80 tends to get quietly ignored rather than reviewed. Star systems compress the same judgement: three stars is a genuinely good wine, five stars is the rare, awe-inspiring one.
| System | Practical minimum | The meaningful band | What it actually signals |
|---|---|---|---|
| 100-point (Parker-style) | 50 (in practice, unreviewed) | 80–100 | 80s = decent to good; 90+ = outstanding; 95+ = exceptional |
| Star systems (UK) | 1 star | 3–5 stars | 3 = good; 4 = excellent; 5 = awe-and-wonder, roughly 19–20 out of 20 |
| 20-point (older European tradition) | low single figures | most wines within 15 points of each other | near-identical graduation to the 100-point scale, just fewer digits |
That last row surprises people. One respected wine writer has pointed out that the 20-point and 100-point scales carry roughly the same twenty steps of real graduation — the 100-point version just dresses it up with extra zeros. Whether a critic uses 20 points or 100 is almost a matter of house style: 20 reads as old-school and European, 100 reads as breezy and global. Same judgement, different coat.
Choosing a bottle when all you’ve got is a number
A score tells you where a wine sits among its peers — it tells you almost nothing about the style of the wine itself, according to one leading American critic who’s spent years defending the very system she now qualifies. That distinction matters more than the digits.
Scores aren’t universal either. A 92 for a lean, savoury Nebbiolo and a 92 for a plush, oaky Napa Cabernet are measuring against completely different genres — there’s no shared ruler underneath. So when you’re weighing up best red wine ratings across a shelf of Rioja, Barolo and Bordeaux, ask what peer group the critic was actually comparing within, not just whose number is highest.
I used to sell purely on the sticker myself, years back — grab the 91, skip the 87, job done. It took me longer than I’d like to admit to start reading the tasting note underneath the score, because that’s where the actual useful information lives: is it tannic, is it fruit-forward, will it sit happily next to a Tuesday night bolognese. The number is the headline. The note is the story.
What are the top 10 best wines?
There’s no fixed, agreed top 10 — every “best of” list belongs to whichever publication or critic compiled it, working within their own genre, vintage and price bracket. A best-Barolo list and a best-Sauternes list are answering completely different questions, so treat any top-10 as a snapshot of one taste, not a ranking of the wine world.
These lists move markets even when the underlying quality gap is tiny. Critics scoring the same Barolo vintage a year apart, from barrel sample to bottle, have shifted a single wine by well over ten points — the wine barely changed, the number did. And whole brands have been built purely around guaranteeing a 90-plus score on the label, regardless of who made the wine or where the fruit came from — that’s a rating used as a marketing badge, not a description.
Vintage charts suffer the same problem in miniature: useful for a rough steer, notoriously unreliable close up, because one region can hold hundreds of producers each doing something different in the same year.
Ratings apps, websites, and shelf-talkers — reading the tools without being read by them
Crowd-sourced platforms like CellarTracker, Wine Searcher and Vivino have genuinely changed things — a wine ratings app now puts thousands of amateur opinions next to the professional ones, instantly. The upside is huge exposure for obscure bottles. The catch, as one Master of Wine has noted, is you often don’t know who’s actually doing the rating or what they’re comparing it against.
Any wine ratings website is only as useful as its transparency about scale, scorer and context. Before trusting a number online, check: which scale (100-point, 20-point, stars), whose palate, and whether the note explains style as well as quality. A shelf-talker in a shop is the same test in miniature — an 88 or 92 sign tells you a score exists, not who awarded it or why.
What ratings do to price
This is where scores stop being academic. Reputation genuinely moves prices — good reviews from major critics and publications routinely let producers justify a rise in the following vintage’s price, and a loss of reputation can drag prices down for years afterward.
The most dramatic case remains 1982 Bordeaux: an exceptional vintage landed alongside a weak franc and strong dollar, first-growth opening prices more than doubled, and press coverage of embryonic barrel samples fed a wave of speculative buying that hadn’t really existed before. Scores gave that speculation a number to hang the buying decision on.
En primeur trading depends on exactly this dynamic — buying wine before it’s finished, based on a critic’s early score of a sample that isn’t even the final blend. One top Bordeaux estate stopped selling en primeur altogether in 2012, partly because it could afford to wait and bottle before showing the wine at all. Smaller producers rarely have that luxury; they need the early cash, score or no score.
Questions customers ask us
Do critics get free samples, and does that bias the score? It’s a fair worry, and it’s exactly why transparent tasting notes matter as much as the number — a note explaining why a wine scored well gives you something to check against your own taste, rather than trusting the score blind.
Why did Robert Parker say critics should give out 100 points more often? He argued that withholding a perfect score from a genuinely perfect wine was “dodging responsibility” — though he also admitted a 100 sets impossible expectations for the drinker. Not every critic agrees; plenty find the idea of a “perfect” wine faintly absurd.
Do all critics score the same wine the same way? No — one well-known case saw a traditionalist Barolo producer’s wine marked in the mid-70s by one panel in the same year a more modern, barrique-aged style from the same vintage scored far higher. Same year, same region, wildly different verdicts.
Is a higher score always the better wine for me? Not necessarily. A 95-point big, oaky red and an 88-point lean, savoury one might both be “correct” wines — the higher score just means the critic personally preferred that style, on that day, against that peer group.
For the fuller picture on reading labels and value alongside scores, our guide on how to buy wine like a merchant covers the ground this piece doesn’t. If ratings have you wondering about vineyard hierarchy too, what Premier Cru and Grand Cru actually mean and Bordeaux’s classifications are the natural next stops.
The merchant’s last word
I’ve watched grown adults argue over two points on a label like it was a football score. Ratings are useful shorthand, nothing more — a nudge, not a verdict, and an unsigned nudge is barely even that. Read the note, check whose name sits under the number, trust your own glass over time, and let the score break a tie between two bottles you already fancy, not make the decision for you. Come and browse the Red cellar and find out what you actually like.
