Wines scores over time

I have not taken he trouble to perform the statistical analysis but it is my expectation that a critic’s score of a wine that is rated with an extraordinarily high score on release in general lower as the wine ages. A wine scoring 97 or 98 points on release is likely to be a 95 after a decade or so. That they do indeed do this is to the critics' credit. And it seems to me (just anecdotally) that scores seldom improve markedly over time.. No doubt the critics themselves monitor these progressions for their own scores for particular wines.

I do not lose sleep over this.  In fact I don’t have much regard to scores at all. But I wonder why it is so that scores over time trend lower. Perhaps it simply reflects that over time there are no great wines only great bottles. Its hard to judge but I expect not as much wine is “perfectly stored” as is so asserted, especially if it has passed through many hands. Or perhaps it is because almost any movement from the cellar in which it came into being is prejudicial to the quality of the wine. Or simply how seductively fabulous is the wine’s fruit when it is fresh from the barrel. Or perhaps the wine is going through a bad phase in its evolution. Any of these reasons may merit a lower score at a later date. But it seems that, in general, a wine 20 years on wil not attract the score it did on release, even when storage is truly impeccable.

It also perhaps simply suggests a certain encouraging optimism at the outset of a wine’s long evolutionary journey.

But reducing scores over time is another reason not to pay too much heed to scores for newly released wines - at least not to differentiate between wines that attract similar but not identical scores. There is, if you like, a “margin of error” in relation to the future evolution of the wine.