Hans Muneesamy

I fell in love with wine in Tuscany in 2023, on what was meant to be a work trip. Between Montepulciano, Montalcino and the villages around them, I opened more bottles and more vintages than I could keep track of, and came back to London wanting to discover everything else.

Back home, a good friend of mine loved the famous names: Sassicaia, Latour, Margaux, Clos de Tart, DRC. I went to tastings built around estates like Rayas and the Domaine de la Romanée-Conti. Some of those wines were remarkable. But more often than not, what was in the glass did not live up to what had been paid for it, and it made me question how much of a wine's price is the wine, and how much is the label.

Since then I have taken trip after trip built entirely around wine: Bandol and Cassis, the Rhône, the Western Cape. In November 2025 I started the Wapping Wine Club, and some of the notes on this site, like the Toques et Clochers, come from those evenings.

Somewhere along the way, drinking wine stopped being enough; I wanted to understand it. I studied for the WSET Level 3 Award in Wines and passed with distinction, and it changed how I taste. A glass stopped being a single impression and became a set of questions. Why does this Chablis feel so taut? Is that freshness the soil, the altitude, the vintage, or a decision made in the cellar? What did the grower set out to make, and did they get there?

Those questions are what drive this site. A wine is the product of a place, a year and a person: the terroir it grows in, the weather that season, and the choices of the winemaker, from when to pick to how much oak to use and how much to intervene at all. I try to understand all three, and to be honest about which one I am tasting. My day job is working with data, so I apply the same discipline here, measuring what can be measured, like the climate at each vineyard, and treating the rest with curiosity rather than certainty.

This is a place for the wines I would buy again. Not the trophies, but the bottles I would happily fill my fridge with, and the ones worth a special occasion because they genuinely earn their price.

The idea behind it is simple: the label and the price tell you surprisingly little. What tells you something is the source. Where the vines grow and what the soil and altitude give them, who made the wine and what they believe in, and what that particular year was like.

So every note here is a wine I have tasted myself, scored out of 20 with value rated separately, and read in that context: the terroir, the way it was made, the thinking of the people behind it, and the growing season, measured from climate records for that exact vineyard rather than taken from a vintage chart. When the place, the year or the winemaker explains what is in the glass, I say so. When the evidence does not support the obvious story, I say that too.

Alongside the notes I publish longer data pieces. The first, Do hot vintages really taste riper?, matches more than 54,000 critic reviews to the weather of their vintage.

The point of this site is that you can trust the numbers, so the rules are simple.

• Every note says where the bottle came from. Bought, sent as a sample or given as a gift, it is shown on the note.
• Nobody pays for a review or a score. Samples are welcome, but they come with no promise of a note, and a sample is scored exactly like a bottle I bought.
• No paid placements. If that ever changes, for example with retailer links, it will be labelled clearly on every page where it appears.
• The data is shown, not just summarised. Climate figures come with their source and their limits, and I correct mistakes openly.