Steve,
Excellent post on ratings and the abuse thereof. Kudos for including all ratings -- you are right, transparency is key to gaining your customers' trust. I am aware of at least one other retailer who provides all ratings, good or bad -- the Chicago Wine Company -- and I have always respected them for this.
There are just too many retailers who show only the high ratings, or worse yet, excerpt the tasting notes with ellipses ("The 1999 Château de Chat-Eau is... ...a very good wine."). This seems a profound disrespect for their customers. Do they want the customers to be happy, or just to move some wine? If the former, they're serving neither the customer, nor themselves, nor the industry well in the long term.
Ditto with emails whose subject line runs something like: "High-scoring Aussie gems for only $25," the implication of which is that we as customers are buying points and not wines. Again, if we are sending the subliminal message that wines should be valued for their points, what will we, the industry, do with the majority of the wines in the world, wines that don't have over-90 scores, or more likely, no scores at all? Many of these are lovely, many are wines that our customers (and we ourselves) would be happier to drink than some high-scoring wines.
Showing a diversity of ratings does more than just gain customer trust. By showing that even the so-called "experts" differ considerably on any given wine, the consumer starts to get the picture that there is no objective right and wrong, and hopefully begins to trust his/her own palate and judgments more. Slowly perhaps we, as an industry, can break down the idea that everything is about points, or at least about one person's palate, and favor the diversity of styles that is necessary for the long-term health of the industry.
I hope that an increasing number of retailers will take the high road, as you have.
