The Weekend Australian feature by Nick Ryan.
Saturday 22 February 2025.

Until I took over this column, I’d never scored a wine in print. I may even have once written the line, “Trying to attach numbers to a wine is like trying to nail a fart to the wall.” But I’m not unaccustomed to the curious practice of trying to assign numeric precision to slippery subjectivity. I do it when I’m doing my own tastings; it’s useful shorthand to extract my favourites from a dense sprawl of scribbled tasting notes.

I’ve done plenty of it over more than two decades judging wine shows around the world, more than enough of them to know it can be an inexact science. Like the time at a wine show in Italy when a young lady from Moscow sat down to share her scores with fellow judges after assessing the first class of wines. She’d given them all a perfect 100 points.

“I’ve never tried wine before,” she announced enthusiastically. “I like it very much.”

This column has a Jong tradition of providing guidance by numbers. My predecessor, James Halliday, had pretty much perfected it and I was more than willing to carry on in that vein.

I work hard at trying to give the most accurate, insightful and objective score I can. Then along comes a wine that makes the whole thing seem rather pointless. Literally.

I knew this was coming. There has been a 100 Year Old Tawny emerge from Seppeltsfield every year since 1978 and I’ve been lucky enough to taste most of them. So, the recently released 1925 doesn’t exactly come as a shock. There is simply nothing else quite like this wine, other than those that came before it. How do you accurately put a number on a wine without peers?

Attempting to put points on a wine that fumed through a hundred summers and contracted through as many winters seems faintly ridiculous. Just give a point for every year of its existence or give it none at all. Nothing changes the fact that this is simply one of the most remarkable liquids you’ll ever put in your mouth. And that’s the whole point.