A Wine whine

I've recently started a small wine cellar, and I've also started keeping records of the wines we drink. Being a bit of a geek, I had to put it all into a database (but I'm only somewhat geeky, so it's not available online). So much, I can hear you thinking, for the romance and mystique of oeneology, eh? Yeah, well, I'd like to spend my wine-drinking budget on good stuff that's worth drinking, and avoid buying poor quality vinegar. My memory is not what it should be for this sort of detail, so putting the information into a database made some sense (if only to me).

As I've been typing information into the database, I'm trying to include information from reviews . . . which means I need to de-jargonize the high-falutin' nonsense that wine reviewers publish. I've also discovered that no matter how many awards a particular wine may have won, I'm often left wondering if the judges were drinking the same thing that I was when I get around to trying it. Even reviewers with whom I seem to have a certain compatibility of taste sometimes leave me scratching my head.

Billy Munnelly, for example, is the opposite of a wine snob. He's a determined wine popularizer and evangelist (oengelist? vinvangelist? vinularizer?), who publishes a bi-monthly newsletter (Billy's Best Bottles) and an annual book on good, inexpensive wines available in Canada. I've found his recommendations to be very helpful, although he's much more fond of "fresh" and "lively" wines than I am (see his site, or his book, for his definitions of those terms).

Vines magazine, I've found, isn't particularly useful to me, in that several wines they've lauded to the skies were pedestrian or worse in my glass. No fault of theirs: my tastes are highly idiosyncratic, but it's good to know how similar a particular reviewer's tastes are to yours in order to give proper weighting to any published review.

In keeping track of the wines, I'm also trying to come up with some sort of simple numerical rating system with an idea of using the price and rating to come up with some rough number indicating the "quality:price ratio" of any given pair of wines. If a wine that I'd rate an 8 out of 10 costs $15.95, is it better (for certain metaphysical meanings of the word "better") than a wine rated as a 9 but costing $24.95? In general, the more expensive the wine, the less chance it'll ever be found in my basement, but I do recognize that a typical $15 bottle of wine will taste better than a typical $8 bottle of wine. The increase in quality isn't linear, by any stretch of the imagination, and (worse) varies from year to year.