Wine Advocate

Nearly every wine review produced by The Wine Advocate carries a rating, otherwise known as a score.

The rating is, in essence, our reviewers' quantitative commentary on the relative quality of the wine at the time of tasting. Readers can immediately recognize our scores when used by wineries or retailers for marketing purposes, by the inclusion of the letters "RP" before the score. Although these letters are Robert Parker's initials, they do not necessarily indicate a score given by Robert Parker himself. RP is in fact short for Robert Parker Wine Advocate, our umbrella company, and so the score could have been assigned by any member of our team of official reviewers.

Robert Parker created our original rating system with the first issue of The Wine Advocate and it remains unchanged to this day. Employs a 100-point quality scale (where wines are assigned a rating of 50 to 100 points), as Robert Parker believes that various 20-point rating systems do not provide sufficient flexibility and often result in compressed wine ratings and inflated. Since its inception, Robert Parker's 100-point scale has become the wine industry standard.