(Forbes) - “Wine Lister is a true hub of information that can adapt to the user’s requirements. It’s a sophisticated system, rating sophisticated wines, for an increasingly sophisticated audience.”

That’s Ella Lister talking about the new 1000-point wine rating system, and that is not a typographical error.

“Wine Lister is a true hub of information that can adapt to the user’s requirements. It’s a sophisticated system, rating sophisticated wines, for an increasingly sophisticated audience.” That’s Ella Lister talking about the new 1000-point wine rating system, and that is not a typographical error.

How did we get from there to here, and is Wine Lister the solution?

Seventy-plus years ago, enology profs at the University of California, Davis campus saw a pressing need to upgrade California wine. To help, they devised the UC Davis 20-Point System for evaluating wine. The scoring system comprises ten parts—Clarity, Color, Bouquet/Aroma, Acidity, Sweetness, Body/Texture, Flavor/Taste, Bitterness, Astringency, Overall Quality—each part with its own maximum score, and each defined, in prose, to guide a trained evaluator. It was technical.

To guide them, consumers were left with the prose of writers on both sides of the Atlantic, many of whom didn’t only write about wine but had interests in the wine business. Then came the wine boom of the 1970s, followed in the 1980s by Robert M. Parker, Jr,  a wine critic who had grown tired of writers with wine business interests, and who popularized the 100-point wine rating system.