Lleichtman made me think more about the scales people use to grade wines.

Many sites use 100 points. Firstly, I wonder why it starts at 50. But ok, it does. so we have 50 points to give.

Parker himself writes this about it:
--------------------------------------------
96-100:
An extraordinary wine of profound and complex character displaying all the attributes expected of a classic wine of its variety. Wines of this caliber are worth a special effort to find, purchase, and consume.
90 - 95:
An outstanding wine of exceptional complexity and character. In short, these are terrific wines.

80 - 89:
A barely above average to very good wine displaying various degrees of finesse and flavor as well as character with no noticeable flaws.

70 - 79:
An average wine with little distinction except that it is a soundly made. In essence, a straightforward, innocuous wine.

60 - 69:
A below average wine containing noticeable deficiencies, such as excessive acidity and/or tannin, an absence of flavor, or possibly dirty aromas or flavors.

50 - 59:
A wine deemed to be unacceptable.
------------------------------------

This maps quite well to my 5 star system that is very pragmatic and gets over the discussion of when is a wine just average and when is it "just good" and makes you ask three important questions "would you drink it? would you buy it? ok, then how good is it then":

* wont drink ** can drink it if served *** good **** very good ***** amazing

while I tend to buy only 4-5 star wines, and 3 star wines on sale to use for cooking.

Ofc the line between good and very good is floating... grading cant be perfect.

And I often couple it with the 100 point scale to distinguish how close it is to the next grade. And I use cellartracker so Im forced to make the connection. Now that one actually seem to move the boundaries between drinkable and tossing and compresses the good wines at the top so basically if you like it, you have to give over 80 points, whereas parkers description, there is nothing wrong with thinking that a 75 point wine is good.

50-69 undrinkable!
now there's 2 decades points reserved for wine that deserve no attention!

while:
http://www.wine-searcher.com/wine-scores.lml

reserves 24 points for undrinkable wine.

I should think one is enough hehe. This compresses the scale a lot into about 25 points. and parker created 100 points to get more room than the 20 point scale.


I also noted that in cellartracker, a mediocre wine often gets 85 points, and one that they say bad things about gets 80. rarely do I see less than 80..

Im thinking people are not using the full extent of the scale and that's what my colleagues was trying to do? O should I have compressed the good part and added the concept of "normal wine" in the 70s so the labels would be:

* wont drink ** can drink it if served *** normal **** very good ***** amazing

On a 50 point scale 50-100, shouldn't the normal be around 75?