When you’re buying wine, particularly Bordeaux, you’ll often see wines with little stickers on them that say things like 91 or 92 points. Even better, you might find a small sticker that says “Macon,” which usually comes from a big tasting the French organize. These stickers are either gold, silver, or bronze, and they are meaningful and accurate indicators of why you might want to choose those wines.
Many wine organizations, like Wine Enthusiast and others, provide these stickers to wineries. If a wine scores high in a tasting, the winery gets to put the sticker on the bottle, and I’d say they’re generally accurate.
So, if you see a wine with a sticker on it, it’s worth paying attention to. These aren’t just bogus stickers that anyone can slap on, like “Instant Best Seller,” for example. It’s not like one of those. These are real stickers, and if they’re from French sources—such as the Macon sticker—they don’t include point totals. Instead, they use gold, silver, or bronze stickers. It’s best to stick to the gold ones and skip the silver and bronze.
In general, the gold stickers are a more accurate sign that the wine is really good. If the sticker includes a point score, it should be over 90 nowadays because of what I call “bracket creep.” Over the years, ratings have been inflated. A wine that scores 90 points today might have been an 88 fifteen years ago.
This inflation is pretty common, but if a wine scores 91 points or higher, it’s likely to be good. I’d say 91 is the minimum to aim for.
These stickers are accurate, and people should pay attention to them.