The expression I love best is “it’s like trying to put bullfrogs into a wheelbarrow.”

Look, I think having a WineBlogger Standard Rating System could be great. Stars, hearts, wine glasses, unicorns–all fine by me.

To be a standard system, though, it doesn’t require that people use the same symbol. It requires that we have the same standard of judging. Within that there will be subjective variation, of course. But if I give stars for value, someone else for perfection, and someone else cause they like it, we aren’t producing a comprehensible rating but something that would not be useful because there were no criteria.

Ryan has articulated a 5-point system rubric on Catavino. I have big quibbles with the top end and the bottom end of that spectrum. But I think for this to gain acceptance we need to focus less on the half points and the icons and more on what they stand for. And it still may not work for what all wine bloggers want to accomplish with their blogs.

I have huge respect for what you’re trying to do, and will continue to put in my .02 as I try to imagine adopting the system.

But then again maybe Pete Townshend was right, “Meet the new boss/
Same as the old boss…”

Cheers!

jason: yes, the peterson review was sucked in from winelog. there are some things i’d like you to tweak… just look at the snooth output and send me an email.

deb: don’t loose faith half-points are your friend (just read ryan’s comment on the other post for details). as you can see from here, my first 2 wines had the same ‘4′ for a score but one was a 3.5 and the other nearly a 4.5… 5 points is not enough room for me. another thing to think about is a 90 point wine would be a ‘5′; so would a 99 point wine. at the top of the scale, a half-point is important.

I think I’ll be waiting to see how this develops. Don’t understand the plug in, how it works, whether it would work with blogger, or where it propagates the scores. For now I’m sticking to CellarTracker and my own 4-level scale which I and my readers seem to understand.

I don’t think wine is like movies. I don’t find wine reviews that say “Loved it” as useful as those that tell me why. And what is the difference between “I really liked it” and I really really liked it”? I don’t know, and until I do I can’t assign stars.

Without a rubric of what these things mean, I am hesitant to make the switch. But if all these kinks get ironed out, I’m all for the standardization idea.

Have you testing this using WineLog RSS feeds yet? Let me know if you need anything on my end. I’m swamped, but looking forward to looking into this more this weekend… hopefully get the plugin running on my blog.