Guess what time it is? It’s the biannual ritual of talking about closures again. This is the time of the year when we state our preference for one over another - bitching and moaning about TCA taint, reduction or sticky plastic corks. Why do we do this? Well, it’s an easy topic and usually gets people riled up, while at the same time, making us feel that we are finally standing up for something.

Here at Catavino, our thinking has evolved from an off and on hate relationship with cork to more of a friend with fringe benefits. Currently, we’re on good standing, but aren’t quite ready to exchange house keys and buy matching travel luggage. We love the idea of cork, and its sustainable properties, but we still love our screwcaps for those fresh whites and young reds. Much to our chagrin, however, we’re finding more and more plastic corks here in Spain, and only one or two screwcap wines.

So let us state for the record that WE HATE plastic corks, and if there are bodegas out …

We know that we’ve bitched and complained since the start about our distaste for the now ubiquitous 100pt scale popularized by Robert Parker. We’ve whined about how it was not fair, nor possible to give wines a rating where we had to choose between 90pts and 89pts. Can a wine be one point better than another? So for the past 3 years, we’ve used a 5 pt scale with 1/2pts allowing for in essence a 10pt system. But late last year, we eventually tossed this to the wayside and moved to a more practical system of “recommended”. Our idea is to make sure that all wines we talk about are wines that we recommend you try. Our main goal is to show people wines that are worth seeking out and judging for themselves.

That was all good until today. Today we find ourselves saddened by the lack of points in our reviews. I’ve come to realize that we are missing the simple number next to our wine ratings, and without this number wineries and consumers will never truly be able to take us seriously.How can a consumer go out and risk buying a wine based solely on our recommendation. How can they buy a wine without knowing where we put said wine in a hierarchy of our enjoyment? The answer is that they can’t! Catavino without points means there can never be a top 100 Catavino recommended wine tasting/auction and this, my friends, is sad. We need to make sure that one day, we have the ability to show which wines were the best wines we’ve tasted and which wines the worse. However, …