Please consider reading the most recent entry in the Miami Wine Blog,
www.MiamiWine.com. Thanks.

Here is an excerpt:

Bo Derek may have been a "1O" in the eponymous movie, but that number
did not tell you much about her (other than the obvious, which I admit
may be enough for a lot of guys, but those guys probably are beer
drinkers anyway and would not much care about wine ratings). I think
of wine as I think of women: neither can be adequately described by a
single number; they both have too many intertwined dimensions to
reduce them to a couple of digits. That is the central problem of the
100-point system; it reduces the complex to the simplistic.

Leo Bueno

Leo wrote on Sun, 12 Oct 2008 17:00:02 -0400:

> Here is an excerpt:

> Bo Derek may have been a "1O" in the eponymous movie, but that
> number did not tell you much about her (other than the
> obvious, which I admit may be enough for a lot of guys, but
> those guys probably are beer drinkers anyway and would not
> much care about wine ratings). I think of wine as I think of women:
> neither can be adequately described by a single number; they
> both have too many intertwined dimensions to reduce them to a
> couple of digits. That is the central problem of the 100-point
> system; it reduces the complex to the simplistic.

AFAIK, the 1000-point Helen system applies to women. Helen of Troy was
supposed to be the most beautiful woman who ever lived and she was rated
at 1000 millihelens (Ivy League sexism of 50 years ago and great fun!)

--

James Silverton
Potomac, Maryland

Email, with obvious alterations: not.jim.silverton.at.verizon.not

HAM radio operators use a five-part rating system called SINPO.

It's an acronym for Signal, Interference, Noise, Propagation, and
Overall, a code used to describe the quality of radio transmissions,
especially in reception reports written by shortwave listeners. Each
letter of the code stands for a specific factor of the signal, and
each item is graded on a 1 to 5 scale (where 1 stands for very bad and
5 for very good). (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SINPO if you're more
interested.)

The use of the SINPO code is subjective and varies from person to
person. That's not unlike wine ratings and the raters themselves. Not
all shortwave listeners are conversant with the SINPO code and prefer
using plain language instead. Same with a lot of wine consumers.

However, it may be time to come up with some variant of the SINPO
system to describe wines, then assign a cumulative score. There are a
couple writers who already do this, n'est-ce pas?

As for www.MiamiWine.com, I find this article on the same website a
lot more relevant.

http://tinyurl.com/3qbu6p

JJ



On Sun, 12 Oct 2008 17:00:02 -0400, Leo Bueno wrote:

>
>Please consider reading the most recent entry in the Miami Wine Blog,
>www.MiamiWine.com. Thanks.
>

On Sun, 12 Oct 2008 17:53:04 -0400, "James Silverton"
> wrote:

> AFAIK, the 1000-point Helen system applies to women. Helen of Troy was
> supposed to be the most beautiful woman who ever lived and she was rated
> at 1000 millihelens (Ivy League sexism of 50 years ago and great fun!)



No, Helen was rated at one helen. A millihelen is the amount of
beauty required to launch one ship, as defined in Christopher
Marlowe's verse:

"Was this the face that launched a thousand ships
And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?"

--
Ken Blake
Please Reply to the Newsgroup

Ken wrote on Sun, 12 Oct 2008 15:14:44 -0700:

>> AFAIK, the 1000-point Helen system applies to women. Helen of
>> Troy was supposed to be the most beautiful woman who ever
>> lived and she was rated at 1000 millihelens (Ivy League
>> sexism of 50 years ago and great fun!)

> No, Helen was rated at one helen. A millihelen is the amount
> of beauty required to launch one ship, as defined in
> Christopher Marlowe's verse:

> "Was this the face that launched a thousand ships
> And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?"

I'm not sure that I see any disagreement but it's good to be reminded of
the alternative definition :-) I remember instant ratings as girls
passed us by tho' they stopped when one of my friends became engaged to
a girl called Helen!

--

James Silverton
Potomac, Maryland

Email, with obvious alterations: not.jim.silverton.at.verizon.not