How do wine critics score according to their country?
As Global Wine Score calculation is based on wine critics scores coming from different countries, we’ve decided to compare these scores sorted by country. That way we should be able to see if a pool of experts from one of the countries is more likely to give high or low scores to a part of Bordeaux region or to a vintage.
The calculation of the Global Wine Score is made on the aggregation of a maximum of 20 wine critics to date (we will add more in the upcoming months). The different scores come mainly from three different countries:
- USA (Robert Parker, Neal Martin, Wine Spectator, James Suckling, Galloni, Wine Enthusiast, Jeffe Leve)
- UK (Jancis Robinson, Tim Atkin, Decanter, Chris Kissack, Matthew Jukes)
- France (RVF, Bettane & Desseauve, Jacques Dupont and JM Quarin)
Results by region
As displaying a chart for all the Global Wine Score database would be confusing, the first chart below shows an average score for ten limited famous producers from Bordeaux left bank for all vintages from 2000 to 2016.
The British critics gave the highest scores for 6producers out of 10. French critics gave the highest scores for the remaining 4 producers. The British critics gave also the highest mean value for these 10 producers.
The second chart display the average scores for 10 producers from Bordeaux right bank for all vintages from 2000 to 2016.
The British critics gave the highest score for 5 producers and French critics for 4. All the mean values for these producers are very close for these three pools of experts.
English and French critics gave very close average scores for these left and right bank producers (respectively 94.44 and 94.33 for left and 94.20 and 94.29 for right). American critics gave slightly higher scores to right bank producers (respectively 93.92 for left bank and 94.13 for right bank).
Results by vintages
The chart below shows this time the ratings sorted by countries and vintages for the 20 producers from left and right bank used in the first part of this study.
What do we notice? The results are globally very close. Only vintages 2007 and 2008 have significantly lower scores from American wine critics. Vintage 2009 has significant lower scores from British critics. All these pools of experts agree on the quality of the vintage 2016, which has tight high scores. Globally, on the ten last vintages French gave 5 times highest average scores, British 3 times and American 2 times.
Conclusion
This article highlights that ratings from different pools of experts are very close whatever their nationalities are. British and French critics gave globally the same scores for left and right bank wines while American slightly preferred wines from right bank.
American critics tend to give lower scores when vintages have worse reputations (vintages 2007 and 2013). Globally, critics tend to agree on the scores concerning vintages and the average scores of this study underlined that fact.
