Reducing the judgment of a wine to a number (in our case in hundredths) is always a stretch that has the value of an indication, whose subjectivity is limited by the presence of a panel of tasters.
To necessarily give scores to wine is certainly a useful practice for readers, who find themselves summarizing in a simple number a number of considerations that are sometimes difficult to explain in a few lines. However, it is also a forcing. To make quantitative, with a number, what is qualitative is such an operation as to make any scholar of philosophy and epistemology in particular cringe. It is a kind of squaring the circle, impossible to execute with absolute precision.
We are therefore in an entirely empirical field, with large components of subjectivity, which make scoring a wine something useful for immediate understanding, but completely lacking in real scientific canons.
This has always been crystal clear to me. It is less so from those critics, but also from those readers, who tend to give a fideistic, almost magical value to the assignment of numerical scores, naively believing it. At best, however, it is just a summary which helps to understand some aspects, but which depends very much on the beliefs and tastes of those who then make those evaluations. This can be, only partially, limited by the use of panels of trained tasters., but certainly absolute replicability and objectivity of evaluations can never be achieved.
These are simple background considerations that I would also like to share with DoctorWine readers because the discussion about the appropriateness of numerically evaluating a wine is always on the agenda. As a former teacher, however, I would argue that as long as we evaluate with grades not wines, but people, in school, in competitions, I believe that even those who do this in our industry are somehow entitled to do so.
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