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The American fixation with list, points and rankings is finally starting to produce some profound results. The bloggers are on the loose!

Wherever you look, may it be Colleges, Orchids, Wine and Food, Cars, Travel or God knows what else, everything is ranked. For years endless printed material was produced and distributed to officially 'help' make up your mind when it came to getting an education, what vehicle to buy, even what toothpaste to use. Either it is the infallible 100 point scale, or an A-D rating, or three forks, a glass, five suns....... oh a symbol is so much easier to read than complicated text! And the best of it you can put ratings in a spreadsheet. Put your wine ratings by the Wine Spectator in a column, divide it by presumed retail pricing and you have the dollar per point ratio for each wine reviewed. Wow! Its vertical, ratings are great. A is better than B, and so forth. And who doesn't want to be in first place. The Olympics of Wine and Food, the Olympics of Orchids, the Olympics of whatever. Everybody is bound to have a passion for something on the weekend. And if you really get somewhat good at something you can actually start judging it. Be welcomed as a judge on our poodle competition! Now you are the decider! Not in the White House, but at least in poodle heaven. Comparing up and down, difficult theories at hand, forging alliances with certain poodle trends, you will hand down your verdict: it is only a poodle and a half. Sorry, only one can win, or no more than 100 points can be awarded (even if this scale won't suffice for Dr. Jay Miller's future career as a wine critic). But reaching the limit, the top rating must be a somewhat orgasmic experience, and the potential buyers and consumers want to share that experience by devouring the scores.

Naturally, size became important, nothing is as easy as to impress with numbers, wine with sheer measurable power, cars with useless record acceleration, plants with dimensions outgrowing the power of their own roots. OK, a dog with five feet can't win a competition, but that poodle over there still is a 16.5, whatever that really means? Size is numbers, it is simple. Even I get it.

But to be honest the vertical scale already started to feel a little stale 5 years ago. If among 23,456 orchids only one fetches the attention, are all those others bred in vain? Or how many wine points can one drink per meal? With a close look at consumer reports most statistics aiming at a vertical order are completely useless, because their application will never be part of one's everyday life. A testosterone driven, vertical market place is a fake market place, depriving the consumer of the diversity and choices otherwise available. What about pleasure, joy and expression instead of size? Why not scale things down and allow them to be part of daily life? Rather than having a 12 course meal, after which we all feel unavoidably sick, no matter how good it is, I'd rather have 6 meals of 2 courses. But I am supposed to like something else according to the so-and-so guide.

But the vertical order is crumbling! The bloggers are talking back! To the surprise of the restaurateur, the winemaker, and the car dealer the consumer is breaking the shackles, no longer bound to receive hierarchical information only from specialized magazines. Is this the time when we will finally see an electric car – after 30 years of waiting? Will we at last be able to drink a glass of Grignolino without feeling guilty? Can even my mutt be the hero of a dog movie? Close, I would say, or at least closer than where we were before. While my dog will most likely not make it into a movie, his chances have risen enormously with the existence of the webcams and blogging. Why? Not because we have abandoned judging and ratings, which are just too much fun, but because rating is now a national sport and everybody is doing it. No longer just one guru per field. No longer just one channel to stare at. Not just two or three, but there are probably over 10,000 food blogs in the US alone! All those numbers and ratings, and carrots and what else, they don't add up to correct and simple any longer. It is just one big pond with a lot of equal talk. Adieu Robert Parker, you were great, but the future appears to have a different shape!

And what better way to fight numbers than by flooding them with more numbers. Watch Gary Vaynerchuk's "Swansong" on wine ratings at http://tv.winelibrary.com/ and enjoy his loose, very loose talk! Go Gary!

For newcomers to the subject start here:

http://becksposhnosh.blogspot.com/

http://thestrongbuzz.com/index.php

http://brunidigest.blogspot.com/

http://blog.foodienyc.com/

http://forums.egullet.org/

http://www.winecampblog.com/

http://www.vinography.com/

Being free to say: I like it or I don't - is a great place to be in, so go bloggers go, but one day we might actually recognize how little we do know, and then we can finally stop needing to judge the wine and just enjoy drinking it!