What’s in a SCORE?
Wine was once scoreless. My 1973 Penguin version of Edmund Penning-Rowsell’s The Wines of Bordeaux brims with figures – most of them for vintages and the tonneaux of wine produced at individual châteaux in those years. The author has clearly tasted and drunk a wealth of fine Bordeaux, distinguishes château styles in a general sense and makes qualitative assessments – but never pins the butterfly to the wheel with a score. Penning-Rowsell’s clubby, discursive assessments follow the model laid down by one-time Guardian journalist, essayist and Edinburgh professor of rhetoric George Saintsbury in his 1920 Notes on a Cellar-Book, written in retirement in Bath.
By the late 1970s, though, change was afoot. From September 1952 onwards, a young wine trade recruit called Michael Broadbent began taking ‘handwritten tasting notes, in excess of 85,000, in small, identical red books – 133 to date’ (as he wrote in the introduction to in 2002). Broadbent came to use what he called a ‘“broad-brush” five star rating system’ – which, since no stars equated to
