THIS is what a blessing looks like in the wine business, writes Gary Rivlin of The New York Times. Wine Spectator, a handsome glossy monthly that markets itself as a field guide for wine aficionados, recently bestowed a rating of 90 on a 2004 Cabernet Sauvignon from the Valentin Bianchi Famiglia winery in Argentina.

This is what a blessing does: After the wine received the 90, Brian Zucker, who oversees online sales for K&L Wine Merchants, a retailer in San Francisco, decided to promote the Valentin Bianchi cabernet in an e-mail message to tens of thousands of customers.

If it had scored an 89, Zucker said, “we would have sold a tiny fraction of what we’ll end up moving.” But because of the 90, and considering the wine’s price, $12.99, he declared himself “absolutely confident” that K&L would sell out its inventory of the Argentinean cabernet. … “A wine that is highly rated takes on a life of its own,” he said. “It doesn’t necessarily represent the best value, but that doesn’t seem to matter.”

A rating system that draws a distinction between a cabernet scoring 90 and one receiving an 89 implies a precision of the senses that even wine critics agree that human beings do not possess. Ratings are quick judgments that a single individual renders early in the life of a bottle of wine that, once expressed numerically, magically transform the nebulous and subjective into the authoritative and objective.

When pressed, critics allow that numerical ratings mean little if they are unaccompanied by corresponding tasting notes (“hints of blackberry,” “a good nose”).

Yet in the hands of the marketers who have transformed wine into a multibillion-dollar industry, The Number is often all that counts.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/13/business/yourmoney/13rate.html?hp&ex=1155441600&en=5e162f7270108630&ei=5094&partner=homepage