How We Rate Wines

Wine ratings are inherently subjective. They can be an informative guide to discovering new wines or helpful with your next purchase, however, the best wine is the one you enjoy drinking. Any reviewer may be partial to a particular style, but should always rate a given wine against other wines of a similar style. Quality and balance is key whether one is drinking a refreshing Rose from Provence, or a spicy Shiraz from Barossa Valley but needless to say, these two wines can not be evaluated against each other.

Our ratings cover wines that we have purchased and personally tasted. If we are given a wine to review at no cost, it shall be noted, however it will not skew our ratings in any way.

We rate on a 10 point scale with 10 being a wine of extraordinary quality exhibiting all the components that a benchmark wine should represent. We do consider value as part of the score because we believe that receiving a good value is important to most consumers. It is important to remember that 2 different wines rated a 9 will both be excellent, but not necessarily equal.

Ratings from 8-10 are wines which are an excellent example of quality and balance for a particular style.
Ratings from 5-7 are of fine quality, but may lack the depth to put them into the higher category. However, these are wines that are enjoyable and something that we would consider purchasing again.
Ratings below 5 either show some weakness in the wine making process, growing season/weather, or wine flaw. These are wines that simply don’t make the cut. It is possible that the bottle reviewed was ruined along the way, but we would note that in each particular review where we believe this to be the case.