Judging

How The Wine Merchant Top 100 is judged

In normal years, all of our judges convene at a London location for an intensive day of judging, divided into two rounds.

In 2020, because of Covid restrictions, we had to change course for the first time and do the judging remotely, with flights of wine bagged up (to obscure labels) and sent to our judges in their homes and places of work.

The system worked well and we deployed it again in 2021 and 2022. We’ve also decided to stick with it in 2023. All of our wines will again be tasted remotely, and blind, by a panel of 40 independent wine merchants.

All of them will be invited to a webinar to discuss the judging process and then they’ll be left to their own devices to methodically go through each flight, awarding scores for each wine and making notes on the ones that perform best.

Each wine will be tasted a minimum of three times. Many of our judges will be tasting in tandem with other team members so the process will be even more rigorous.

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 listed among our Highly Commended 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.