Walk into any decent bottle shop and you will find shelf talkers festooned with scores. 93 points. 96 points. Gold Medal. Best in Class. These little badges are supposed to help you make a faster, smarter purchase. And for a twelve-dollar bottle of table wine, maybe they do. But agave spirits are not table wine, and the assumption that a numerical score serves you well in this category deserves a hard, honest look.
What a Score Cannot Tell You
Consider a bottle of espadin mezcal from the Central Valleys of Oaxaca and a bottle of tobasiche from the Sierra Sur. Both might earn 91 points from the same reviewer on the same day. What you cannot know from those twin scores is that the espadin is briny and tropical with moderate smoke and would be ideal over a single large ice cube, while the tobasiche is fibrous, savory, and bone dry and practically demands you drink it straight at room temperature. These are not two expressions of the same thing.
Agave spirits represent a level of diversity that arguably exceeds any other spirit category. Within mezcal alone, reviewers contend with dozens of agave varieties, wildly different cooking methods, fermentation vessels ranging from open-air pine vats to bovine hide, and distillation in clay, copper, or stainless. A numerical score compresses all of this into a single integer. That compression is a loss.
The Case for the Score
Scores establish a quality floor. A spirit that earns an 85 from a credentialed reviewer is almost certainly not defective. Scores also enable rapid comparison across large catalogs — useful for a retail buyer managing 200 agave SKUs. And for someone new to agave spirits buying their first unfamiliar bottle, a score from a trusted publication functions as social proof, answering the question “is this worth sixty-five dollars?” with at least a probabilistic “probably yes.”
What scores do reasonably well is communicate quality relative to a reviewer’s internal benchmark. What they do not do is communicate character.
What a Narrative Actually Does
A well-written tasting note does something a number cannot: it positions a spirit in your sensory imagination before you open the bottle. Read a note that describes cooked sweet potato, charcoal, white pepper, and dried chamomile flowers, and you have something to anticipate. If you already know you dislike anything smoky, a note that specifies “light but persistent smoke with a medicinal edge” saves you sixty dollars and a disappointment. A 93 would have told you none of that.
Written narrative also allows for context that scores structurally exclude. A reviewer can note that a particular mezcal is one of the last expressions made from a specific agave population before harvest pressure forced a suspension, or that a Blanco tequila was produced without the use of diffuser technology. None of that survives compression into a point value.
The Competence Problem
Both formats are only as useful as the reviewer behind them. A numerical score from someone who has tasted 4,000 agave spirits across thirty years of fieldwork is a radically different instrument than a score from someone who discovered mezcal eighteen months ago at a trade event. The number looks identical on the shelf talker. Written narrative, at least, tends to expose competence — a reviewer who does not know what they are tasting will produce vague, generic notes that a seasoned reader can clock immediately. A numerical score hides ignorance efficiently.
The Agave Category Is Not Average
Most scoring systems were built for categories where consistency is a virtue. Agave spirits, particularly mezcal, operate on entirely different terms. Batch variation is not a flaw; it is a feature. Scoring batch A at 93 and batch B at 89 does not mean one is better than the other. It means they are different, and different is the point.
The score also creates commercial pressure to optimize toward what scores well rather than what is most true to tradition and terroir. If high scores cluster around a particular flavor profile, producers seeking market advantage have an incentive to drift toward that profile. What gets lost in that drift is the staggering diversity that makes the category worth caring about.
A Modest Conclusion
Neither format is going away, and frankly neither should. But the consumer who learns to read a good tasting note will always be better equipped to spend their money wisely than the one who shops by score alone.
The score is a shortcut. The agave category rewards curiosity and patience in ways that most spirit categories do not, and a well-written tasting narrative is one of the primary vehicles for developing that curiosity. It teaches you how to taste, not just what to buy.
When you are standing in a bottle shop holding an unfamiliar bottle with a shelf talker and a score, try to find the narrative first. The score might tell you the bottle passed inspection. The story tells you whether it belongs in your glass.