For those who haven’t seen it, please have a look at how we score wines on Hudin.com and also how the three-star scores that accompany the numerical ones are intended to function.
We bring attention to this page as while our scoring is based upon the 100-point system, there are small details that give a bit more of a “four dimensional” aspect given that wine is always changing in the bottle. Additionally, any winemaker awarded a score from this site is welcome to use these icons to promote it.
There is however one scoring attribute that raises a number of questions and that’s the “destination” score. By this we mean scores you’ll see such as: 92+94 or 94+97. It’s important to make mention of these as they’re used rather differently than in other publications. For example, look at this recent excerpt: “Château Ausone 2021 had the most significant decline: initially scored 97-100 points in 2022 and subsequently downgraded to 94+ points.”
These types of range scores are very different from our destination scores and are often seen in en primeur tastings in order to give a general sense of what the wine should eventually arrive at in very, very broad strokes. As shown by the later results, they can ultimately not say that much and that’s before one even gets into the topic about the actual value of en primeur.
The concept on Hudin.com is to always give a score that serves a function. So the destination scores are meant to say, “this is where the wine is now, this is where it will be in time”. Thus, a 92+94 rating would mean that if you open the wine now, it’s a 92pt wine, but in due course (a timeframe mentioned in the accompanying tasting note), the wine should be a 94pt wine. We encourage wineries to make use of the higher score for simplicity as these upper destination scores are what we send to Wine Searcher via our ongoing partnership.
If it’s difficult to make a final call on a wine or it seems that it will simply continue to evolve for a greater length of time, we use a +, thus, 92+. Likewise, a wine could also be scored as 92- which means that it’s 92pt today, but it’s a wine that’s on the decline and should be drank sooner rather than later.
The intention via our Tasting Reports is to always provide data that’s as useful as possible to you, the final wine drinker, and we hope this clarification does just that.
