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100 point wines

100 Points – What does it mean in today’s fine wine market?

History

Back in the day, the magic number wouldn’t just sell the wine, it would move the market, a lot. By back in the day, I’m probably most referring to the noughties when a certain Mr. Parker ruled the roost. It was he, in fact, that made the 100 point system the preferred choice, largely pushing the University of California Davis (no relation) scale of 20 points aside. And it was he who made the perfect score such a prize. The inside line on a Parker 100 became as valuable as Lawrence Beeks’ frozen concentrate orange juice production numbers, but maybe not everyone has seen the epic ‘Trading Places’?

There was a time when there was not a single case of a 100-point wine that was priced at under £3,000 (per 12 bottles). These included the likes of Latour ’82, Mouton ’86, Haut Brion ’89, Petrus ’89 and ’90 etc. These were wines with immense stature, with a certain level of maturity, fully established 100 pointers that had been tasted and retasted and even consumed!

 

The Internet effect

During the noughties, much more information was coming online, the appetite for fresh resource was surging, and maybe immediacy became more important than maturity. Scores were becoming more important, although there was still an air of restraint, yet times they were a-changing. When Mr. Parker published his notes for the 2009 vintage, 18 different wines were awarded the perfect score (2 more than his own Wine Advocate published for the whole of red Burgundy from years 2009 to 2019 inclusive!).  As well as some of the obvious names, the list included the likes of the relatively lowly priced Smith Haut Lafitte and Pontet Canet, to no little effect. But could Smith Haut Lafitte ’09 really be as good as Haut Brion ’89? I somewhat doubt it.

It could be argued that was the beginning of the end for the impact of the perfect score. Since those times, there has been a huge rise in the number of journalists being taken seriously, and an explosion of perfect scores, across all the famous wine regions and price points, yet now it doesn’t seem to matter that much. Perhaps it is the current state of the fine wine market in general, or the ennui related to another new release bearing the inevitable 100 point headline but ‘flying off the shelves’ is a little used phrase in wine circles at present.

 

Scoring trends

Average scores have risen steadily over the decades. This is, no doubt, about improved winemaking but just possibly more so to do with commerce. It is interesting to note that at the “Judgement of Paris’, Steven Spurrier’s historic 1976 tasting, the lowest score out of 20 was a miserly 2 and the highest of all was 17, a modern-day equivalent of an 85 – how times they have a-changed!

Obviously, 100-point scores were popular with merchants as it meant selling the wines that much easier and with investors also, with decision-making simplified. It didn’t do any harm to the critics searching for subscribers either. The consumer didn’t mind it either, particularly if they got in on the cheap, so we are all to blame.

 

The last words

BUT, and it is a big but, any critic worth their salt, would not give anything 100 points unless they truly believed it was a truly great, great wine. If there happen to be multiple critics awarding the magic score, you really can rest easy. Internally, there are many emails circulated with ‘6×100 points’ embedded in their titles, and those wines really do tend to sell, just not fly, at the moment.

 

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