Score Inflation

 It is an understood wisdom that in order to maintain credibility the wine critic needs to form opinions independently of any extraneous influence - most notably in the absence of any financial inducement that might result in a favorable disposition towards any particular wine. 

However, there is also sometimes a more subtle incentive involved.  It is a reality that high critics scores sell wine. The owners of very reputable wine stores have confirmed this to me. If a retailer is looking to attach a independent critic’s review of a wine that it wishes to promote the retailer is commercially motivated to include critics reviews that speak highly of the wine and, in particular, that attach a high numeric score to the wine listed.   Any review by a critic that is less favorable can feely be omitted. One too often receives promotional material that very directly relies on a critic’s score to generate interest. “94 point wine for less than $35 !” and such.   In this way critics benefit from scoring wines highly since it is only their reviews, duly attributed, that are enlisted by the retailer to market the wine.  My point is that the selective inclusion in the retailers marketing material of critics who rate the wine very favorably is of course in itself a promotion of the critic. So there is a mutual incentive for the critic to rate wines highly - it sells the wine, to the benefit of the retailer, and (presumably) freely markets/promotes the critic to the retailer’s client base.

This creates a potential bias towards inflating scores - which does a disservice to whatever value one may or may not attribute them. 

More importantly, the wine critic who consistently scores wines more modestly - even if simply as a matter of calibration -  fails to gain the exposure generated from being chosen by the retailer. I am not sure how all this works financially but one cannot ignore a prospective downside for the consumer - who surely witnesses both selective grade inflation in published scores and a bias by retailers against displaying critics who review wines in more measured language and who numerically rate wines across the board at lower scores.  Perhaps the consumer should be protected by some rule obliging retailers to post a variety of critic’s reviews if they post any at all.

There are many worthy and long established wine critics whose scores for wines are used by retailers.  These ‘bigger name” critics are normally have their own publications that are subscription based. The subscribing clients would not accept any score inflation purely for the purposes of self promotion. Nor do these critics require such promotion. So if a retailer then uses that critics score in promotional material, the wine buyer has some protection from score inflation by virtue of the critic needing to have paying subscribers to their publication to make a living. This note is not intended to infer that all critics artificially score wines highly in order to be selected by a retailer when promoting wines for sale. But it is an unspoken influence of which the consumer may wish to be mindful, particularly perhaps in the context of critics with as yet less established reputations who need to make their voice heard.