(Telegraph) - here is safety in numbers. This is the theory behind the ratings that have spread like a rash through every area of our lives. We give scores to Uber drivers, books on Amazon and fellow users of Airbnb, and a controversial proposed new app called Peeple has threatened to take the urge to judge everyone and everything one step further, inviting us to rate friends and acquaintances.

Scores are a hugely popular way to judge wine and a high number on a shelf sells bottles – that’s why Lidl pay a Master of Wine to garland their bottles with impressive-looking numbers. We can all see the drawbacks to this: spite ratings, fakery – and can you take seriously the scores of someone who is paid by the retailer in question to give them? But my question is simpler.

Can you trust numerical rating systems more than linguistic ones? Are they more useful or more honest? Is there any point to points?

What do the numbers mean?

For me the first problem with wine points is that hardly anyone has a clue what a score actually means, as illustrated by the reaction of two friends at a party recently when I was asked to rate a friend’s Aperol Spritz-making abilities out of 100 and gave them 85.

“Oh that’s good!” exclaimed Jane, a wine civilian. Well you would think that, wouldn’t you? You’d be thrilled with 85 per cent in almost any exam. 85 would be some kind of genius first in a university essay.

“Oh dear,” said Miles, a wine fund manager who knows that according to the 100-point scale developed by the influential American critic Robert Parker, and mimicked by almost everyone else, 85 isn’t exactly a gleaming endorsement.

So what does it mean? On his website Parker defines 80-89 as “a barely average to very good wine, the equivalent of a B in school,” which doesn’t sound so bad. In practice, the wine trade assumes that any score below 85 is the equivalent to saying, “Avoid”.