Much research shows that the ratings that judges assign to wines are uncertain and an acute difficulty in ratings-related research, and in calculating consensus among judges, is that each rating is one observation drawn from a unique and latent distribution that is wine- and judge-specific. A simple maximum entropy estimator is proposed that yields a maximum-entropy probability distribution for sample sizes of none, one, and more. A test of that estimator yields results that are consistent with the results of experiments in which blind replicates are embedded within flights of wines evaluated by trained and tested judges