(Bloomberg) - A former financier has launched what she claims is the first data-based wine rating system to compete with long-established critic scales.

Move over Robert Parker. A former Lazard investment banker has created a data-driven fine wine rating system with a wildly ambitious, 1,000-point scale. The just-launched website [www.wine-lister.com] is now live.

I started out highly dubious that it would be useful in helping wine lovers decide what to buy. The idea of a bottle with a score of 1,000 points seemed like a parody of the 100-point system instituted by Parker, the don of American wine criticism. Even that approach seemed ludicrous to many when first introduced.

Besides, do we really need more wine ratings? For many wine lovers and retailers, the importance of scores has been waning for years—except when it comes to buying Bordeaux and Bordeaux futures.

So I spent a few pre-launch hours perusing Wine-Lister’s site with London-based founder and Chief Executive Officer Ella Lister to discover how Château Haut-Brion, for example, gets to 959 points. What does that mean, exactly, and should anyone care?

Do Taste and Data Correlate?

I was more impressed than I expected to be, but then I’m a wine geek who’s fascinated by wine data.

First of all, the Wine-Lister score reflects more than just a subjective assessment of taste and quality, which is all that the system set up by Parker—and those of other critics—aim to do.

Lister (wine-lister, get it?) likes to call her system “multi-criteria.”

“There are many more objective, measurable factors people use in deciding what wines to buy than just taste,” she said. “I wanted to pull together those disparate bits of information and give buyers a more nuanced, 360-degree, holistic view of a wine, all on one page.”

Château Haut-Brion’s basic score is a distillation of layers of data—the wine’s estimated longevity, its popularity in the marketplace, price, performance at auction, quality level, and the global strength of the brand. All of these are factors, Lister argues, that are important to people when considering whether to buy a bottle.