We all approach assessing wine in our own way but mention that all wines in a group must be given a score and the background dynamic changes. A score means that a tally can be done to identify the best wine and alarmingly the worst wine. No one wants to be seen as a supporter of the worse wines so how do you head off this embarrassing possibility?

One way is to not go out on a limb, which means you do not suggest any wine is better than any other. In the early 1980s the National Wine Show in Canberra introduced the idea of judges from overseas joining the panel to add diversity of opinion. To keep an eye on this for a few years I used to peruse their scores to see how they saw things next to local judges. A famous Italian turned up one year and I admired his technique which was to point all wines in every class half a point either side of 15½. You do not get the applause of a star but you also develop no enemies.

If you join a tasting group you will have a lot of fun but at some point it will get serious, as it should, and scores will be called for. What is amazing, and this is often not apparent from discussion, is the wide spread of scores. You can be certain that any tasting of a dozen wines by a dozen tasters will produce a result where the favourites of some are the least liked by others.

The opinions of professionals also diverge widely, though perhaps not to the extent of amateur circles, and normally a lot of talking happens in the background to align scores.

The great marketing genius Robert Parker knew that exposure to masked tastings should be kept to a minimum and normally knew what he was tasting. This of course reduces risk which is an excellent idea for staying on the top.

Working out the best wine in a tasting group is generally done by adding up the scores and dividing by the number of tasters. What happens is that the extreme highs and lows, the diversity of opinion, is compressed and the final result normally shows many wines clustered together with only a small numerical difference. Naturally there is a best wine but the least liked is usually not far behind.

This may lead to heated debate particularly if your most favoured is turned into an also ran. After you have done this for decades you might also wonder if the results are a true indicator of the best wines and perhaps ponder the statistical validity of this approach.

Researchers have begun pondering the statistics behind tasting and I found this paper of interest:

"Increasingly, economists and cultural critics are arguing that wine tasting is junk science. This column argues that the problem with wine tasting lies not with the impossibility to consistently tell a good wine from a bad wine but with how the wines are ranked. If a new system of game-theory-based rating and ranking using the Shapley value were implemented, wine tasting might get a better hearing from its critics". Ranking wines using the Shapley value; Victor Ginsburgh, Israel Zang, 1st August, 2013.

They go on to say:

"Some judges are generous, others are less so, and the ranges of marks used by the judges may vary as well." As noted by Ashenfelter and Quandt (1999), this "may give greater weight to judges who put a great deal of scatter in their numerical scores and thus express strong preferences by numerical differences".

They nominate a simple scoring system:

"We suggest a new game theory-based rating and ranking method for wines, in which the Shapley value of each wine is computed, and wines are ranked according to their Shapley values."

This is simple and easy to apply. Each taster has one vote worth one. You can assign your one vote to your top few wines or assign it to a single wine. Thus if you give your single vote to your top five wines they each get 0.20 points.

A tally is made and the top wines of the tasting are ranked.

Whether this would work better than the numerical rating or the ranking method now used I do not know. Certainly the idea of not giving any score to the wines you dislike has merit. As the authors say this method needs to be tried over many tastings to see whether the results make more sense.

What I do know is that judging and pointing wine is probably little more than an approximation. The big men like Len Evans and Robert Parker who can sweep aside inbuilt prejudice to see what the rest do not are few and far between.