Wine Apps
Are Wine Ratings and Scores Actually Reliable?
Are wine scores reliable? A 92-point rating is a useful signal, not a verdict. Here is what the 100-point scale and Vivino ratings really measure, and what they leave out.
A wine score is a useful signal, not a verdict. A 92-point rating tells you a wine is well made and that someone with a trained palate liked it, which is genuinely worth knowing. What it cannot tell you is whether you will like it, how it pairs with your dinner, or whether it is worth the price. The number compresses away the part that actually helps you choose.
Where the 100-point score comes from
The familiar 100-point score was popularized by the American critic Robert Parker in the late 1970s, through his newsletter The Wine Advocate. He argued that the older 20-point systems were too cramped and tended to bunch everything together, and that a 100-point scale gave more room to separate wines.
In practice the scale does not really run from 1 to 100. Almost everything reviewed lands between 80 and 100, and anything below about 85 rarely gets published or promoted at all. So the meaningful range is narrow: 90 is the gateway to “outstanding,” 95 and up is “exceptional,” and the difference between an 87 and a 91 is the difference between a wine a shop will quietly stock and one it will put a shelf-talker under.
That compression matters, because it means a handful of points carry enormous commercial weight while resting on a fairly subjective judgment.
What a wine score actually measures
Here is the part the number hides: a critic score is one person’s reaction to one bottle at one moment. Even the best critics are human palates, and human palates disagree.
A score reflects the taster’s own preferences, the dozens of other wines they tasted that day, the order they tasted them in, and how the wine happened to be showing that afternoon. None of that is fraud; it is simply what tasting is. Parker himself has been candid that the jump from a 96 to a perfect 100 comes down to emotion rather than measurement, and that the written tasting note tells you more about a wine’s character than the number ever could.
That last point is the quiet admission underneath the whole system. Even the person most associated with scores has said the words matter more than the figure. The score is a headline; the reasoning is the story.
It is easy to see why this has to be true. Ask two people who both genuinely love wine to rate the same bottle and they will often land a few points apart, not because one is wrong, but because one prizes power and the other prizes freshness. Multiply that by the hundreds of wines a working critic tastes in a week and a small, honest amount of slack is baked into every number. A score is best read as “somewhere in this neighborhood,” not as a precise measurement you can trust to the point.
The 90-point cliff, and other quirks
Scores are not just subjective, they bend in predictable ways, and knowing the patterns makes you a smarter reader of them.
- The 90-point cliff. Ninety is a magic number for selling wine, so there is real pressure around it. Studies of large rating sets have found bias clustering right at 90, where wines that might honestly be an 89 get nudged over the line because the difference is worth real money.
- Style bias. Powerful, ripe, oak-driven wines historically scored well, which pushed some winemakers to chase that profile. Critics called it “Parkerization,” the worry that chasing points flattens regional character.
- Vintage and timing. A score is a snapshot. A wine reviewed young may taste very different in five years, and a number printed on a shelf often refers to a vintage that is no longer the one in the bottle.
None of this makes scores worthless. It makes them a measurement with a known margin of error, which is a very different thing from a fact.
Critic scores versus crowd scores
There are really two kinds of wine score, and they fail in opposite directions. It helps to know which one you are looking at.
| Critic scores (Wine Advocate, Wine Spectator) | Crowd scores (Vivino) | |
|---|---|---|
| Who rates | One trained expert | Millions of everyday drinkers |
| Strength | Consistent, calibrated benchmark | Broad consensus, quick reality check |
| Main bias | One palate; historically favors bold styles | Price and reputation inflate the average |
| Blind spot | Your taste and the occasion | Why the wine tastes the way it does |
Critic scores give you one well-calibrated opinion. Crowd scores like Vivino average out individual quirks but introduce a new problem: people partly rate the label. The same wine tends to score higher when tasters know it is expensive or famous, and the averages bunch up so tightly that almost everything decent lands between 3.6 and 4.2 stars. Both are useful. Neither is the truth.
What about gold medals and competition awards?
Those shiny medal stickers, gold from one competition, silver from another, are a third kind of rating, and they play by the same rules. A medal from a serious event like the Decanter World Wine Awards or the International Wine Challenge means a panel of judges tasted the wine blind and rated it well, which is a real signal that the wine is sound.
But medals carry every limitation of scores and add a few of their own. There are a great many competitions, and a wine that took bronze somewhere may have entered several just to come home with a sticker. Judging happens in large batches, sometimes against hundreds of wines in a sitting, and the result is squeezed into a single dot with even less detail than a number gives you. Treat a medal the way you would a score. It is reassurance that the wine is well made, and no guide at all to whether it suits your particular taste.
What a score can’t tell you
This is the heart of it. Even a perfectly fair score leaves out most of what you actually need to decide on a bottle.
- Whether you will like it. Your palate is not the critic’s. If you love bright, lean wines, a 95-point blockbuster might be exactly wrong for you.
- How it pairs with your dinner. A score rates the wine alone. The same bottle can be brilliant with steak and clumsy with fish.
- Whether it is good value. A 90-point wine at $60 and an 88 at $18 are not remotely the same proposition, and the score says nothing about price. That is a separate question we cover in how to tell if a wine is good value.
- What the wine is actually like. Light or full, dry or sweet, oaked or fresh: the number tells you none of that. Only the description does.
A score answers “is this competently made and well liked?” It does not answer “is this the right wine for me, tonight?” Those are different questions, and the second one is the one you are really asking in the shop.
How to actually use a wine score
Scores are worth paying attention to; you just have to use them as a filter, not a final answer. A few habits make them far more useful.
- Treat it as a floor, not a verdict. A solid score is good evidence the wine is not faulty or dull. Past that, stop letting the number decide.
- Read the tasting note, always. This is where the real information lives, the style, the structure, the flavors. If a description sounds like something you enjoy, that beats a number every time. Our plain-English glossary helps decode the jargon.
- Find a palate that matches yours. Critics and apps are most useful once you know whose taste lines up with yours, then their scores become a personal shortcut rather than a generic one.
- Ignore one or two points. The gap between an 89 and a 91 is noise. Do not pay a premium for a point or two of someone else’s opinion.
If you mostly meet scores inside apps, it is worth knowing how those apps differ, which we break down in the best wine apps.
Reasoning beats a number
The deeper issue is that a single number is a strange way to describe something as layered as a wine. A score collapses style, quality, value, and personality into one figure and throws away the reasoning, which is the part that would actually help you choose. Even the inventor of the scale said the note matters more.
That is the gap AboutWine is built to close. Instead of handing you a number, it explains what a wine actually is, how it is likely to taste, and whether it fits your palate, with the reasoning laid out in plain language. A score tells you a crowd approved; reasoning tells you whether you will. It is in early access now.
So are wine ratings reliable? Reliable enough to be a helpful signal, and far too blunt to be a decision. Lean on them to narrow the field, then read past the number to the words, because the words are where the wine actually lives. Used that way, a score stops being something to obey and becomes what it was always meant to be, a quick way to shrink a wall of unfamiliar bottles down to a short list worth reading about, and then tasting for yourself.
Want the reasoning behind the bottle, not just a score? Join the AboutWine early-access list.
Frequently asked questions
What does a 90-point wine mean?
On the 100-point scale, 90 is the threshold for "outstanding," and most wines sold sit between 85 and 95. A 90 means a critic judged the wine clearly above average, but the line between 89 and 90 is psychological as much as real. The same wine could earn an 89 from one taster and a 91 from another on a different day.
Are Vivino ratings reliable?
They are useful for spotting consensus and avoiding obvious duds, since they average huge numbers of everyday drinkers. But they skew high, and a wine's price and reputation visibly inflate its rating, because people partly taste the label. Treat a 4.2 average as a green light, not proof that you personally will love the bottle.
Should I buy wine based on its score?
Use a score as one input, not the decision. It tells you a wine is competently made and roughly how others rated it, which is genuinely helpful. It cannot tell you whether the style suits your taste, how it pairs with tonight's dinner, or whether it is good value at its price. Read the tasting note for that.