Judging

How The Wine Merchant Top 100 is judged

Our 40 independent merchants will convene in north London for two rounds of judging. They will be divided into teams and will blind-taste a series of flights of wines. At this stage we’re looking to see which wines deserve to make it to the next round and which need to be eliminated.

After a lunch break, the wines are then reflighted and new teams created. The wines are blind-tasted once again, but this time we’re asking our judges to score each wine and to provide notes about why that score has been given.

They’re asked to consider the commercial appeal of the wine at the RRP that the supplier has provided. So a £10 wine may score very highly, if it’s an excellent wine for that price. Equally, a £50 wine may achieve a lower score if our judges think it’s overpriced. The results usually include a wide variety of wines at all kinds of price points.

We’ll have a senior panel of judges on hand to chat to our teams as they go along, ensuring that there’s consistency in the scoring. They’ll also retaste many of the wines, perhaps giving a second chance to wines that were rejected in the first round in a borderline decision.

Once all the tasting is done, we will collate all scores and work out our provisional Top 100. Wines which did well, but not quite well enough to secure a Top 100 placing, will be among our Highly Commended wines.

After some final checks, we’ll announce the winning wines.

We will also be publishing a rundown of the top performing wines with a recommended retail price of £15 or below. Some or all of these wines may already appear in the Top 100 or Highly Commended lists.