Wine ratings can be a contentious subject and I've already done my own rant on them last year (see How to use wine ratings successfully). But I wanted to expand further on the last part of that post addressing how retailers use professional ratings. Here are a few approaches a retailer could use:
- Show highest ratings selectively - The selective representation of ratings is the norm for retailers. The goal here is to promote the highest possible ratings but only when above a threshold to encourage buying. The quality of the source is less important than the number. The actual commentary on the wine may or may not be provided. A corollary to this approach is that wines with ratings below the threshold are displayed without their low ratings (the theory being that bad ratings are worse than none).
- Display professional comments without the ratings - The philosophy here is that the descriptions help sell the wine but the ratings might turn people off so hide them from the buyer.
- Show all ratings, good and bad - This method provides transparency (at least for an identified set of sources). It recognizes that many wine collectors will independently check ratings using their own paid subscriptions to reviewers' sites if none are provided or a rating is missing. Moreover, as ratings are only one input into a purchase decision, I could easily argue that a poor rating on a wine from a favorite producer creates buying opportunities as price likely reflects less buyer demand.
Deception?
Let's face it. Methods 1 and 2 are less than totally honest ways of dealing with customers.
Transparency builds trust
As far as I know, Vinfolio is the only wine retailer who voluntarily offers up all ratings, good or bad, for a reasonably complete set of professional sources. This transparency enables our customers to make informed purchase decisions without spending extra time looking up reviews and breeds trust in our brand.
To be fair, taking this approach is easier for us than most retailers because we pay to license all review content from major reviewers such as Stephen Tanzer, Allen Meadows, Roy Hersh, and Richard Juhlin (see today's press release on the addition of Juhlin and our content partners page). This content is deployed both in our free VinCellar online cellar management software and within our online store. So whenever we are selling a wine reviewed by one of these parties, the most recent rating from each source is automatically displayed (without censorship!). See example below:
In addition to our current licensed content partners, Vinfolio also manually adds Robert Parker and Wine Spectator scores wherever possible (and yes, we would be glad to license their content too if we could persuade them to do so). But the lack of an automated way of mapping their reviews to the wines we are selling means we will always have "holes" for these valuable sources. Finally, Vinfolio also tries to provide its own ratings and reviews whenever there are none from professional sources (or to supplement them).
Bottom line: Which approach to retailers' use of ratings would you prefer as a buyer of wine? What would you do if you were a retailer and why?