Wine writer RICHARD CALVER has a copy of the latest Halliday Wine Companion and while he salutes the work of  doyen James Halliday, he’s not comfortable with numeric scores being attached to wines. 

I bit the bullet and finally bought an up-to-date version of the Halliday Wine Companion.

I paid $42 at Paperchain in Manuka. In part, my motivation was that in the weeks before the 2025 Companion going to print mid-2024, James Halliday at 85 announced his retirement.

He has been an icon of the Australian wine industry with his first overview of Australian wine, entitled The Australian Wine Compendium, being published in 1985 and since then an annual review of the industry has been published.

He has had an extraordinary career having written and co-authored more than 40 books on wine over the past 25 years. He was a lawyer turned wine writer, judge and winemaker; he founded the Hunter Valley’s Brokenwood and Coldstream Hills in the Yarra Valley (both of which remain five-star-rated wineries in the latest guide).

I often use the guide to check the status of a new winery that I haven’t heard of before and if I like a wine from a particular winemaker I check the guide for their details.

The only problem I have with the current book and all of its predecessor volumes is that a winery’s rating is based on how many wines of a high point score it produces, with a five red star rating being a winery that is “outstanding” because it is “regularly producing wines of exemplary quality and typicity.” It will also have “at least two wines rated at 95 points or above, and has had a 5-star rating for the previous three years.”

I dislike numeric scores being attached to wines. Wine journalist Patrick Dussert-Gerber in a recent article on the wine site Vinodiversity in fact summed up my own feelings about points systems: “(T)he whole idea of putting numbers to define quality is absurd. Numbers imply hard objective data. In fact wine assessment is mainly subjective.”

I said something similar in 2017 when I wrote that the experience of wine is circumstantial and individual. The enjoyment of wine is, obvious faults aside, a matter of taste in the literal and figurative sense.

It is a pity that a person would buy wines just based on someone else’s rating. That phenomenon is, perhaps, discouraging people to learn from buying and tasting in accordance with their own preferences built from a unique history. As with so much of life, what you like as a matter of personal taste matters more than what an expert says.

I also note that with the greatest respect to Halliday and his co-writers, the points system used whilst expressed as a 100-point system is not so.

Again, as Dussert-Gerber indicates: “In fact, Halliday’s system is NOT a 100-point scale. Some writers use a system that rates wines from 50 to 100. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a wine score less than 80. I assume that some of the judges do score wines less than 80, but they are probably so faulty as to be undrinkable at that level. It is hard to imagine a wine which scored 67 being any more palatable than one that scored 57. So it’s really a 20-point scale, from 80 to 100.”

So, while I now have a shiny new wine guide to grace my bookshelf, I will still rely on my own judgment when it comes to rating wines and discussing them in these columns.

A mathematician sees three people go into a building. Later she sees four people leave. When she is asked how many people are in the building she replies: “Well, if one person enters the house it’ll be empty.”