How we score

The scale

We score on 100 points. The scale is the one used by most of the English-language wine press, which is deliberate: a score is only useful if it can be compared to other scores. There is a number and there is what the number means, and nothing else. We do not put a letter beside it, because a letter is the same judgement said a second time in a shorthand that invites being read as a separate verdict.

The line that matters most is 90. At 90 and above we are saying a wine is worth acquiring, to drink now or to put away. Below it we are describing wines we were glad to drink, without making that claim for them.

Not everything we taste appears here

We write up a fraction of what we open. Some wines are tasted in conditions too rough to score fairly, some we have only met once and want to see again, and some we have nothing useful to say about. The absence of a wine from this site is not a verdict on it.

Does 96 mean the same thing in every category?

Yes, and this is the hardest commitment on the page, so it is worth being explicit. A 96 point Trockenbeerenauslese and a 96 point Barolo are claims of equivalent quality within their own terms. They are not claims that the two wines are interchangeable, or that you would want them in the same situation.

The practical consequence is that we do not grade on a curve within a category. A merely correct Barolo does not get 93 because Barolo is a prestigious appellation, and an outstanding Kabinett is not capped at 91 because Kabinett is an inexpensive category. If you see divergence between our two tasters on this, we would rather you could measure it, which is why the next section exists.

Two tasters, and how we keep them honest

The site has two tasters, Harris and Kenneth. They cover different parts of the world and rarely taste the same wine, which creates a real calibration risk: two people applying one scale to non-overlapping samples can drift apart for years without either noticing.

We handle that in two ways. First, we taste a joint mixed flight every quarter, deliberately spanning both territories, and compare scores before discussion. Second, where both of us did taste the same bottle, both views are published on it: the wine keeps the one score we agreed on, and the second reading appears beside the review as its own take rather than being averaged away.

Notes sometimes carry a guest take as well, from someone who is not a taster here. Those are labelled as guests, they are never part of any average, and they never move a score. They are published because a wine that reads one way to a specialist and another way to a person drinking it with dinner is worth knowing about.

How we taste

Every review records the tasting date, because a score is a judgement about a bottle on a day, not a permanent property of the wine.

We publish a drinking window on every wine. For anything built to age, the window matters more than the score. A 98 point Barolo that is closed for another six years is not a wine to open tonight, and the review will say so.

What we do not do

We do not accept payment for reviews, we do not sell advertising alongside scores, and we do not let producers see a score before publication.