While I don’t believe that scores are the most important part of talking about wine, they do provide a point of reference against other wine reviews from the same critic.
I had a look at a number of quality scoring systems when starting this site and I noticed that there are too many different systems around, I saw scores of out 5 stars, 10 points, 19 points, 20 points, 23 points, 25 points, 100 points, 109 points and the toungue-in-cheek TDP system (scores to three decimal places). Thus, in the interests of attempting to obtain a small amount of standardisation with the two main wine critics in Australia (James Halliday and Jeremy Oliver) as well as some of the other Australian blogs (Vinosense and Winorama) I will be using the 100 point system.
Keeping in mind that I am a fairly hard marker, my point system works roughly along the following lines.
Below 80 I very much disliked it and/or it was totally faulty. To be avoided.
80-83 is stuff that is bordering on me tipping it out - probably a fault of some sort with it.
84-86 is generally pretty average, maybe a very small fault or two at the low end of the range.
87-89 is what I don’t mind drinking on weeknights, not special but easy to drink.
90+ is that I liked it quite a bit and it would have a good chance of me making a purchase. These should make a statement about variety, winemaking technique or region.
94+ is pure excellence, delivering something special with genuine class and character.
97+ would be enough that I would be willing to drop everything that I was doing just to get a taste of it. Reflects the pinnacle of the style or region.