Every note uses the same scales, so any two wines on this site can be compared. This is what each number means.
The score rates quality only: balance, intensity, complexity, length and how typical the wine is of where it comes from. Price never affects it. A brilliant £14 bottle and a brilliant £140 bottle can score the same.
Scores are relative to wine as a whole, not just to the region or style, so a top-scoring Muscadet and a top-scoring Barolo both have to earn it on the same scale.
The bands follow Jancis Robinson's 20-point scale, so a score here means the same thing as one of hers. A half point sits within the band below it: 17.5 is still “Superior”, just at the top of it.
Value asks a different question: is the wine worth what it costs, compared with what else that money buys? It is judged at the price I paid, in pounds, at the time I tasted it.
The years in which I expect the wine to drink well, from a bottle stored properly. Where it is useful, I also mark the peak: the years I would choose to open it.
The shape of the wine in the mouth, drawn as a radar on each note. Most measures use five steps; alcohol uses three, set by the strength on the label. These describe a wine rather than judge it: high acidity is not better than low, it depends on the style.
Each note includes what the growing season did at that vineyard, from April to October in the northern hemisphere and October to April in the southern. The data is ERA5-Land, a reconstruction of past weather from the Copernicus Climate Change Service, taken from the grid cell nearest the vineyard. Cells are about 9 km across, so they blend hilltops and valleys.
Every figure is compared with that same spot's 1994 to 2023 average, so “+1°C” means one degree warmer than normal for that place, not warmer than some other region.
I only link weather to the wine where the numbers support it, and I say so when they don't. The reasoning behind tying the two together is in Do hot vintages really taste riper?