There has been quite a bit of discussion in the wine blogosphere about wine ratings in response to Blake Gray’s piece in the San Francisco Chronicle last week. I’ve blogged quite a bit about this in the past, so I’m not opening up the question of continuing with the 100-point system or not. What I do think is interesting is the idea of some sort of standardization among those of us who blog about wine.

Given the passion around the 100-point system, I am not going to suggest this as the wine blogger standard. Neither will I propose either the Vinography 10 point or UC Davis 20-point systems. Because, as Ryan said a while back, shouldn’t the web (and wine bloggers) be different?

What makes the most sense to me is the 5-star systems adopted by most of the Wine 2.0 tasting notes sites and fully supported in the hReview standard.

Hear me out here… first, the scale is easy to understand and implement. It can also be used by readers to rate the same wines and the tasting notes sites can more easily extrapolate a composite score. I also think it is imprecise enough for more participants which is the problem with the 100-point system; it’s exclusiveness to just us uber wine geeks.

So I’m going to propose that wine bloggers rally around the 5-star system. I think the addition of 1/2 points will allow plenty of granularity and overlay all the other systems well enough for widespread adoption.

So who’s with me?

Over the next few days I will be posting some reviews on both Snooth and Winelog that will be reposted automatically here. They are the first two sites to implement an easy way for me to post once and then pull into my blog with no effort on my part. I’m hoping other sites follow suit, as well.

And, for the time-being, I will also post my 100-point score for those who like that system along with the new 5-star scale which at some point in the future will be the only scale I will use to rate wines.