Vinous: Wine Reviews & Ratings

I’m an user of Vinous, Wine Advocate, Jancis Robinson and Cellar Tracker and here is how they compare. Jancis Robinson (JR) has the best search function, best focus on quality value and most poignant reviews. Their articles are also a treat to read. In the better known regions they have a consistent history of scores by JR herself and by Julia Harding. In the satellite regions, there is not much consistency between vintages due to changing critics and their chose winemakers. Everyone scores a little different - JR is predictably strict and Walter Speller gives 17.5 to pretty much every decent wine, while some other authors like my beloved Tamlyn Curryn may get infatuated. That is all correct and truthful, because it shows the fallibility of numerical scores and exposes the wine to the critic’s tastes, as it should be. For that reason, JR is the most honest. The scoring seems to express the potential of the earliest recommended drinking age but definitely not the full potential of the wine. What JR definitely lacks is the side note or addendum to wine notes, that would further reveal the wines character. Wine Advocate has the most prosaic and journalistic style of notes. It also has a lot of consistent history, even in satellite regions. It has a great reach among prestigious wineries and is stylistically quite descriptive in wine notes. With closed wines like young Barolos, the notes are long but say little about the taste and more about production, but that is all understandable. I suppose the scoring tends toward the wine’s full potential, often being 1-2 points higher than JR or Vinous. Vinous, conversely, I find strict and dry. Especially Neal Martin. He uses the low end of the score scale as freely as the high end, offering greater resolution than critics who squeeze most scores into a narrower score band. And yet, he is not that useful for my purposes. His notes are too factual, authoritative and judgemental to reveal the emotional energy of wine that I need to understand before buying. Antonio Galloni is a much more complete critic in this sense, with just as wide a range of scores even if a little more benevolent at times. I wish he scored even truer to his personal bias than by seemingly objective metrics of quality. My favourite Vinous author is Stephen Tanzer. His writing is like a woman’s: insightful in every important way. Vinous, just like Wine Advocate, are extremely useful for their wine note addendums, where the character of the vintage or production methods are explained, and sometimes purchasing tips are revealed. The best resource of them all is CellarTracker. Rarely does it have fewer notes than all of the above combined and it goes well beyond barrel samples and young pre-release bottlings. Yes, it takes much more time to research which user to trust, but then you get a historical line of comparisons across a producer’s range or the region’s best. It’s the best tool for wine discovery and all of my hidden gems come from there. It’s also free. Just don’t look at the score average for a wine because many notes seem inaccurate. I admire all of the above, including the tens of thousands of willing wine reviewers on CellarTracker. There’s a lot to choose from.

I’ve depended on Vinous reviews sin AG started the company and find them consistent and reliable.

The site is long on wine puff and short of usable wine selection information. The site is not user friendly as to the limited amount wine data. Would not recommend If vinous responds can you recommend a better and more useful site. Thx

This app really meads to be updated. One can not look at it in horizontal view. A log of the searches lead to no results, because the search function is just plain bad. This app could be so much more! It has the best wine tasters in the world writing for it, but a terribly bad app. Please fix it.

When I try to subscribe the app crashes.

I can almost always find the wine in question! Great info about the wine and a source for purchase,too!

Terrible app won’t let me sign up just look up the wine this rip off is not worth it.

This app would have been primitive 10 years ago. It’s hard to believe that accomplished, respected professionals would put their reputations and their brand on the line with something so poorly designed and built. It’s easy to create a good and even great version of this. Why have they not?

I have been selling wine for a wholesaler fit 20 years. I have read Antonio and Neal since their Advocate days.Great in-depth writingAnd so happy to see folks finally take their wine maps seriously! Keep up the great work

Search no longer works. Forcing me to renew, even though my sub has not expired. Just using the website works fine.