Hundred-point wines

Hundred-point wines are the Cartier of the wine world, the Cullinan diamonds of wine. The idea implicit in awarding a wine a perfect score is that it’s just that: perfect.To quote from Wine Enthusiast’s ratings parameters, a wine that scores between 98 and 100 points is the “absolute best. Pinnacle of expression. Perfect grape, terroir, winemaking.”

So why is it that I’ve given only three wines 100 points over the years? For that matter, I’ve rated only one wine 99 points. There are some magazines that compete with Wine Enthusiast that have more perfect 100s in a single issue than I’ve given in my life!

I think it comes down to the way critics approach wine tasting. I’ve tasted wines I thought were magnificent on opening, and was tempted to give very high scores to. But, after a while in the glass, something happened to lower them in my esteem. Maybe, as they breathed and warmed up, they revealed a trace of bitterness. Maybe there was some green unripeness that jarred my palate, or maybe the oak was, on second thought, too clumsily applied. So down went the score by a couple points.

On the other hand, I’ve had wines that disappointed me right off the bat, to which I tentatively assigned only middling scores. But then the wine woke up and showed me something I hadn’t noticed before. It could have been that the rusticity I at first detected was in reality a youthful vigor that bode well for the cellar. So up goes the score — not to perfection, but higher than my previous rating.

What I’m trying to say here is that the critical judgment of wine is a moving target. Wine changes in the glass, sometimes within seconds after being poured, and most certainly after minutes. As the oxygen in the air invades wine’s being, subtle chemical changes occur, changes that can be even more profound in a white wine, since it’s also warming up to room temperature. This is why, when I taste my daily average of 12 wines, it takes me a minimum of 90 minutes. That’s about 7-1/2 minutes per wine, which in my opinion is barely enough time for a diligent reviewer to consider the wine from multiple perspectives, and with a depth of understanding that can’t be achieved with the kind wham, bam, thank you ma’am approach that some critics take. I mean, I know of critics who taste 100 wines in the same 90 minutes I take to do a dozen. That’s less than one minute per wine.