I seem to have stirred up a fair amount of discussion in the blogosphere about my proposed 5-star (or whatever image you want) system for rating wines. Emboldened by the positive comments from my fellow bloggers I posted a couple of test reviews to Snooth and Winelog and then reposted here (see last 2 posts).
Umm, not good; the formatting was off and, as subscribers to my Twitter feed will attest, I had to do a bit of work to get these reviews presentable on the site. I don’t think this is due to anything in the feeds but from some issues with my current WordPress theme, since all the tests I have done on my personal blog have worked without any modification.
So my question for other wine bloggers is what needs to change in the format of the reviews before you will join me in using the 5-star system (and these Wine 2.0 services) to post your reviews?
hi Tim – you’ve got my right brain working overtime – thanks! Response on elbloggotorcido.com in the interest of spirited discussion – cheers! – j
Tim,
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.
Tim, I’m getting serious cold feet. Comments on previous post suggest wide variance of difference in approach to star system, and the 1/2 stars turn me off–though they seem to turn everyone else on.
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.
el jefe: as i twittered earlier, i agree with your sentiment; the rating is just the maraschino cherry on top of a verbose, passionate review of the wine in question. unfortunately, i’m the mr. spock of wine bloggers right now and will need some feedback for recovery 🙂 check out my review of your totally awesome pet a bit later on…
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.
Tim: I read Ryan’s comments. That’s what made me lose faith! So does “a 90 point wine would be a 5; so would a 99 point wine.” Right. What’s the problem? They’re both amazing wines! I think I’ll wait and see but right now this is just the 100 point scale under a different name.
Deb: I’m beginning to think that a unified rating scale is like herding unicorns but I don’t think it is as controversial as the 100-point scale. What I like about 5-stars with 1/2-star increments is a level of precision but it’s also loose enough so everyone doesn’t just chase 95+ point wines.
But then again maybe Pete Townshend was right, “Meet the new boss/
Same as the old boss…”
Cheers!
Tim:
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.