Lists Can be Confusing

Every year, lots of publications produce lists of the best of the year. In the wine world, probably the most celebrated of the bunch is the Wine Spectator Top 100. Maybe, it's mor obvious to you, but it confuses me. And, I think that perhaps in its confusion, it gives away its secrets.

During the course of the year, that publication rates thousands of wines. They rate them by sending their experienced tasters around the world to do ratings and reviews on all these wines and then publish them.Wines that score 95 points or more are considered exceptional, 90 points or more excellent, and while they don't tell you this, once they get below 85 points, they just don't taste very good. And, unlike other publications that use a similar ratings scale, Wine Spectator just doesn't rate wines as a 99 or 100 (yes, once in a very long while they do, but it's not an unusual year when they don't do that with any wines). So, their rating scale essentially goes from about 85 to 98 with wines rated below 85 just not being worthy of purchase as drinkable wines. That's a silly scale, but that's an entirely different conversation.

So, over the course of a year, they might give a handful of 98s, perhaps 2 dozen 97s, and far more 96s and 95s. And, then they award their Top 100 culminating with the Wine of the Year. In their editorials or articles about the WOTY, they often describe this as the "most exciting" wine of the year.

Okay, what makes a wine exciting? To me, if it were one of those rare wines that scores 98 points from WS or even rarer that score 99 or 100, that would be pretty exciting. And, it would seem that the most exciting wine of the year would need to come from the group of the highest rated wines. In other words, if there were, in fact, 5 wines that scored 98 points that year and none any higher, the WOTY would have to be 1 of those 5.

Wrong. It doesn't work that way. That would make too much sense.

For 2020, for example, a year in which there were a handful of 98-point wines, the WOTY was a 96-point wine. But, it was awarded because of some nonsense about the history of this particular winery. Now, all that said, the Bodega in question does have a storied history. And, the wine in question was awarded 96 points. But, what about the 98 point wines? Weren't they better? Weren't they more exciting? Or were their scores just mistakes that never got corrected?

I think it's like everything else in the 21st century. There's a lot of politicking going on. But, it's valuable politicking. When a relatively little known winery has the Wine of the Year, it puts that winery on the map and if the winery is from a little known wine region, it might put that region on the map.

How exactly does this happen? Are there ever exchanges of anything of value? Wine? Money? Future draft choices or just futures?

Bottom line: consider the Wine of the Year to be a very good wine, but if you couldn't get your hands on it before the price spiked due to its becoming WOTY, be wary. You might be rewarding them for having rewarded someone else. Caveat Emptor.