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[Zinner]

Guess it depends on whether you think that kind of information is useful or not. To think it is valuable, you have to accept that the scores really mean something significant and my own experiences tell me they have limited usefulness. Probably mostly useful if you have exactly the same likes and dislikes as the person doing the scoring, but that gets cancelled out when you muck around with the numbers.

One year at the Sonoma Showcase and Auction, I was at the final event--a lovely picnic on the lawn at Sonoma-Cutrer with a concert by the San Francisco Symphony followed by fireworks. With the food, I quite enjoyed a Cabernet Franc made by a winemaker sitting near me. It was splendid and I said as much to him.

He said he was proud of it, but had sent it to a major wine publication at THEIR request, not just on his own, and they had given it a low score. It seems after he sent it in, months passed and it didn't get reviewed. Finally, since they had asked for it, he called them up. They told him that they hadn't been reviewing Cab Francs, to which he replied, "Oh, but you reviewed X and Y and Z Cab Franc last issue and mine would have fit right in."

Then very soon after that, they did review his wine and gave it a terrible score. Funny thing is another national wine publication also reviewed it and gave it a very good score.

So which score was accurate? My tongue told me, but depending on which the score the QPR used, you might get quite a different result. He can't know the background on all the scores.

After the concert, I was chatting with a member of the symphony and we were talking about this scoring of wines, the problems and the pitfalls. "Why do Americans want to believe the scores," I asked.

The symphony guy said he thought it was the football mentality in America. That people think there always have to be winners and losers.

Well, I know the losers in this equation--the consumers who place too much emphasis on scores.