Tongham Taster's Wine Scoring System

As someone who likes to remember if I liked a wine or not and whether I’d want to buy it again, a wine scoring system is appealing. For the last few months I have been experimenting with different methods and this is the one I am favouring at present. Personally I find systems that only give 5 points rather restrictive and ones that give over 50 points rather out of my judging ability range. I stumbled across the University of California wine scoring system on the web and after a bit of simplifying and tweaking came up with following system which I will continue experimenting with. By splitting up the scoring into a wine’s different attributes and by by putting down a description against each score it is reasonably easy to use. It also makes you consider the wine carefully rather than just slurping it down – this is another plus of trying to score wines yourself.

Look – 0 for Cloudy, 1 for a wine that is not very bright, 2 for a wine that is clear, has a nice colour and is brilliant.

Smell – 0 for off smells or corked, 1 if the wine has very little aroma, 2 for an average pleasant aroma, 3 for an intense complex aroma.

Body, Weight, Feel & texture – 0 for totally wrong feel & texture, 1 for not particularly good feel & body, 2 Average for feel & body, 3 above average, 4 for perfect feel & body.

Taste, Balance and Complexity – 0 for tastes off or corked or awful, 1 for not a particularly good taste, 2 OK but not well balanced, 3 Balanced but lacks complexity, 4 Balanced and Complex.

Length and aftertaste – 0 Poor aftertaste or no length, 1 Average aftertaste and linger, 2 Great aftertaste and linger.

How Much Did You Enjoy The Wine – 0 Ugh!, 1 Just drinkable, 2 OK, 3 Really quite pleasant, 4 Very good wine, 5 Wow!.

In this system it is acceptable to give half marks where you feel necessary or are undecided.

Overall this scores a wine out of 20 and exceptional wines get 15 or more, pleasant wines score about 12 to 14, and wines you want to avoid under 10.

It is always good to make a few other comments on your score sheet as well so you can remember the wine.   Once you've scored the wine note the score and the comments in a pocket size notebook that you can take with you when you are buying wine.

In the future we'll share some of our scores.  Until then, happy slurping!!!