Passing judgements on wine has been very much on my mind recently as for better or worse the wines I taste and enjoy are the ones that will make an appearance on our wine list.
Everybody is at it! Cuisine runs tastings every month and those purple and gold stickers sell wine in Nu Zild in the same fashion as scores out of 100 sell wine in the U.S. I'm in the team that feels a kind of hopeless horror at the use of the 100 point score and the gradual Parkerisation of wines globally. So when my lovely father sent me a copy of Michael Cooper's article detailing, amongst other things, Hugh Johnson's suggested alternative I was so rapt with its apt-ness I just had to reproduce it here.
English writer Hugh Johnson suggests an alternative to the 100-point system, which you can use at home. The minimum score is one sniff, with a step up to one sip. Two sips indicate faint interest. One glass means tolerance, even general approval. Four glasses mean the wine tickles your fancy, and two bottles mean it's irresistible.
This seems, by far, the most winning system of assessing the merits of one wine over another. I love its beautiful simplicity and irreverence and I have more than half a mind to put it in to practice.
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