Grand Vin Wine Merchants UK | Blog

I love tasting wine, almost as much as I love drinking it. I love arguing about it, or for it. I’m unfailingly thrilled by the opportunities I have to try some of the world’s greatest, rarest or oldest wines. I attempt to convey a wine’s character and qualities in a way that I hope is helpful to fellow wine lovers. But I score wine with a heavy heart. It goes against everything my mentors have taught me, and my own instincts. I concede the usefulness of wine scores. When I am judging hundreds of similar wines (same broad origin, same vintage) in concentrated succession, scores help with the necessarily rapid recalibration of relative quality, and when I get back home and have hundreds of notes to make sense of, they can also help to identify quickly the star-performing commune. I also empathise with the consumer’s liking for wine scores. That unequivocal number crosses language barriers and inspires confidence: a definitive and concise judgment in a wine landscape of bewildering ch...