About Us
About the Palate Matcher
Modern consumers are accustomed to using accurate filters to find exactly what they want to buy on sites like Amazon and Airbnb. But wine buying, especially for novices, is more like guesswork, resulting in costly mistakes and frustration. Scores alone are increasingly irrelevant. It’s enough to make potential new younger consumers walk away from the category.
The Wine Palate Matcher is a game-changer for wine lovers. Its filtering system depends on wine experts mapping each wine's aromatic and taste profile. Parameters include the usual basics: wine color, type, grape variety, dryness, and region. Then the wine’s unique taste characteristics are further mapped using a range of possibilities within categories such as faults, fruit expression, major fruit type, other aromas (up to three), body, acidity, oak, tannin level, texture type, and state of maturity. Additionally, each review offers up to four types of food pairings. And with every review, users are offered similar palate matches, giving them a range of choices to explore—a simple way of discovering new wines like those already enjoyed. Now it’s easier than ever to ensure that every wine you buy is a bottle you’ll love!
What We Do
The Wine Palate offers unbiased, expertly judged wine reviews. A proprietary Wine Palate Matcher lets subscribers quickly find wines in our extensive database that accurately match their palate preferences. We publish new reviews, winery stories, vintage reports, and editorials weekly. Our aim is to inspire new wine discoveries, inform wine experiences, and ensure every wine we help you find is a bottle you will love.
The only wine palate that matters is yours.
Method
We aim to taste the wines in their peer groups, meaning that the same or similar regions, grape varieties, styles, and vintages are tasted together in flights. Occasionally, we will taste blind, but this is often neither practical nor necessarily the best means of assessing wines. Because we are highly experienced regional experts and without any agenda that could create bias, we do not consider it essential to taste blind. In most cases, judging the wine in the context of our experience of other bottles/vintages results in a better assessment.
We also travel to the regions we review many times each year to produce accurate vintage assessments and understand the dynamics that led to what we taste in the glass. We go to great lengths to bring our readers the story behind the wine, with detailed written and visual reports. Occasionally, we conduct barrel tastings, as is the case with the production of our annual Bordeaux en primeur report. Which wineries we visit depends entirely on the discretion of our critics.
Objective Reviewing
Many critics and professionals claim that judging wine quality and scoring wines is mainly subjective, suggesting that they give higher scores to their favorite styles. And this may be the way a lot of wine drinkers approach such assessments. But those that rate quality based on how well it matches their stylistic preferences ultimately taste for themselves, and perhaps a niche set of friends have the same preferences. Otherwise, they simply tell followers what they like and urge them to like it.
At The Wine Palate, we do our utmost to put personal preferences aside and taste objectively, judging quality as it exists across a broad range of styles. We don’t applaud only the styles we like; we commend the best examples of many styles. Ultimately, we’re here to help our readers find the best examples of the styles they love.
Style
You may wonder how it is possible to put our own stylistic preferences aside when judging quality. To that, we would answer, style and quality are very different things. On a basic level, style helps consumers understand how a wine tastes. Style factors include the color of the wine, whether it is a table, fortified or sparkling wine, and the level of sweetness. Wine components such as tannins, acidity, body, alcohol, notable winemaking (such as oak), and aroma/flavor compounds are also style factors. Still, they are more challenging to assess and describe accurately, requiring some technical knowledge and considerable tasting experience.
These factors in and of themselves do not define wine quality, but they can and often do define stylistic preferences. Some people, for example, don’t like high tannins and therefore tend to choose grapes with lower or softer tannins, such as a Pinot Noir, instead of Cabernet Sauvignon. Others dislike high acidity and will therefore opt for a Pinot Gris over a Riesling. Some embrace full-bodied, higher alcohol wines, and others prefer light-bodied, lower alcohol wines. The fact that there are styles of wine to suit everyone’s tastes is one of the things that makes the wine world so incredible.
Quality
Quality exists across a whole range of styles. When quality is the priority, styles will differ for every given site and every vintage. Attributes that contribute to wine quality include:
- Aroma/flavor intensity
- The complexity of aromas and flavors
- Textural pleasure/interest
- Balance
- A long, pleasant, multi-layered finish
But the simplest, most crucial factor behind wine quality is the ripeness of the grapes - ripe in terms of sugar, acid, pH, aroma compounds, tannins, etc. Terroir and human intervention are all about achieving and preserving this fundamental yet incredibly elusive concept of optimal ripeness.
WHAT IS RIPENESS?
We don’t see ripeness as a single point on a graph. There is no singular, ideal moment in time when a berry is perfectly ripe, prior to which it was under-ripe, and beyond which it is over-ripe. Of course not! Anyone working in wine production knows that there can be a band of ‘right moments’ within which the berry is perfectly ripe.
The decision of when to pick it can depend on stylistic vision. Some vintages will narrow the ripeness band to sit within a particular style, creating a vintage imprint. Problems arise when grapes don’t make it into the ideal ripeness band, perhaps due to site, vintage, vine disease, and so forth.
Financial considerations dictating higher yields can also impact whether grapes achieve ripeness. Some winemakers under or over-shoot the ripeness band in pursuit of a particular style, perhaps at the expense of quality.
As oenologists know, the accumulation of aroma compounds, for example, rises and falls across a bell curve. Grapes that are under or over-ripe therefore miss or lose complexity. But this is not to say that elegant, refreshing styles AND big, rich, bold styles cannot both fall within that ideal ripeness band in a vintage, depending mainly on the site and the varieties planted there.
Stylistic diversity and terroir signatures are the lifeblood of great wines. To deliver a pure, authentic sense of place, time, and person in a glass of wine—regardless of the style—is a transmigration of culture into a glass. Great wine should be more than just a delicious alcoholic beverage; it should be an experience.
The Wine Palate Scoring System
At The Wine Palate, we score wines based on the 100-point scoring system. Our scores can be interpreted as follows:
96-100 Points:
A wine that scores 96 to 100 points is exemplary. It has multiple layers of aroma/flavor compounds, many of which will evolve or have evolved over years of cellaring. The wine exhibits impressive ripeness for its style, neither over nor under-ripe, delivering concentration, complexity and structure, which together form a harmonious composition. This category of wine further possesses a degree of singularity, expressing attributes that can be linked back to its provenance, the vintage, and the winery. Scores within this range are rarely awarded and even then, only after careful consideration. They are truly worth the hunt!
90 - 95 Points
The wines within this score range are excellent examples of their style, exhibiting well-judged ripeness, depth, harmony, and skillful winemaking. Any wine with a 90 point+ score comes highly recommended.
80 - 89 Points:
These are good to very good wines that are well-made and fit-for-purpose, warranting attention for everyday drinking. Wines within this score range will likely lack the necessary complexity, intensity, balance, or structure for significant further development in the bottle to deserve a 90 point or above score.
70 - 79 Points:
At this score level, the wines are below par to mediocre. Quaffable yet unexciting, they may possess minor flaws but are otherwise suitable for everyday drinking.
60 - 69 Points:
A wine scoring within this range can be considered distasteful and is best avoided due to issues such as ripeness, poor winemaking, or faults.
50 - 59 Points:
These are wines that are faulty beyond all possibilities of recommended consumption. In our modern era of better-informed grape growing and winemaking, fewer and fewer wines fall into this category. Today, it is almost impossible to make and bottle a wine this poor for commercial release. Almost.
The Limitations of Scores
Scores are an essential part of a review, informing wine consumers where a wine sits qualitatively versus its peers. But, just as a scholastic score evaluates a student’s performance, wine scores comment on the collaborative qualitative performance of aspects such as site, vintage, and winemaker. In other words, scores are a grade reflecting the measurable quality factors within a wine. These factors include the absence of flaws, fruit ripeness, intensity, complexity, balance, length of finish, etc. And so, just as a student sitting an exam can achieve a grade of “100” if they answer all the questions correctly or if the quality of their work is of an infallible standard, a wine can, exceptionally, achieve 100 points.
A grade on an exam or relating to a student’s performance in a subject isn’t everything; it is just part of the story. A test grade tells you nothing of the student’s personality, their sense of style, or if you will even like them. Why? Because a score cannot begin to relate all those qualities of a person (or wine) that are immeasurable.
Wine scores tell the reader nothing about the wine’s style or character. They do not convey whether the wine is light-bodied, perfumed, and elegant or if it is full-bodied, rich, and generous. A score doesn’t tell the reader if the wine is savory, fruity, spicy, herbaceous, or toasty. It doesn’t explain if the wine is too young to drink, is within its drinking window, or is over the hill. The score simply tells you if it is a good example of its style, whatever that style may be.
Finding Your Wine Style & Experience
Most wine drinkers have specific style preferences, which can vary according to occasion and mood. This is where scores falter because they can’t help you find the style or type of wine experience you crave. At The Wine Palate, we’re here to help you home in on your style preferences. We offer a broad range of new filters that aren’t available on other websites, allowing you to search by body type, alcohol level, primary grapes, etc.
Finally, a well-written, accurate tasting note is essential for managing your wine experience expectations. Our tasting notes contain all the style, character, and maturity information necessary to give you an accurate indication of the kind of experience you can expect. Furthermore, anyone who has truly been bitten by the wine bug will know that some wines, like people, can trigger emotional responses. Wine can be a mind-blowing, sensual, mesmerizing, haunting, jaw-dropping, or heart-stopping experience. Conversely, wines can be innocuous, boring, confusing, and plain awful. A score cannot rate the emotions that wine elicits, but our critics are on hand to describe those emotional experiences, further helping you with your wine buying decisions.
Samples Submission Policy
Wineries interested in submitting samples can write to us at:
Please include details of the producer’s name, vintage, label name, country, region, alcohol level, suggested retail price, and grape varieties of the wine you would like to submit. If we are interested in tasting your wine, we will contact you with sample sending instructions or add you to our sample call-out list for when we are next reviewing wines from your region.
We do not accept unsolicited samples.
About Lisa Perrotti-Brown MW
Founder
Lisa Perrotti-Brown has spent over 25 years in the wine industry, living and working in London, Tokyo, Singapore, and now Napa, California.
In 2008, she became a Master of Wine and received the Madame Bollinger Medal for excellence in wine tasting. That same year, she began working for Robert M. Parker, Jr. at The Wine Advocate.
In 2013, she became editor-in-chief for Robert Parker Wine Advocate and RobertParker.com and was the publication’s critic for Bordeaux, Napa Valley, and Sonoma County wines.
Lisa’s first book, Taste Like a Wine Critic: A Guide to Understanding Wine Quality, was published in 2015. In 2021, she left Robert Parker Wine Advocate to become co-founder of The Wine Independent and continues to write about the wines of Bordeaux, California, and further afield.
In 2025, she founded The Wine Palate, a new kind of wine publication designed to help consumers easily find the styles of wines they want, while elevating the experience of wine.
About Vanessa Conlin MW
Reviewer for Italy & Burgundy
Vanessa Conlin is a Master of Wine residing in Napa Valley.
She began her wine career in New York City as a wine buyer for two retailers and the wine director for a Manhattan wine bar. Drawn to the vineyards, she relocated to Napa Valley in 2010, where she held leadership roles as Director of Sales and Marketing for prestigious wineries, including Arietta Wines and Dana Estates. Vanessa later transitioned into the online space as Chief Wine Officer at Wine Access, where she remained for six years. Following that, she served as the global head of wine retail for Sotheby’s, where she continues to be a consultant.
An avid supporter of philanthropy, Vanessa serves on the Board of Jameson Humane, a local non-profit, and has chaired its annual charity wine auction twelve times. In 2024, she hosted Auction Napa Valley, supporting youth mental health initiatives in the region, and in 2025, she served as Auction Chair and Auctioneer for From Ashes to Hope, a charity event that raised funds for children and families impacted by California wildfires.
Prior to her passion for wine, Vanessa enjoyed a career as a professional opera singer, performing internationally and on Broadway. She holds a Master’s Degree in Music.
About R.H. Drexel
Feature Writer
R.H. Drexel is the pen name for a wine business insider who has worked in nearly every sector of the wine industry for the last 30 years. In 2012, Drexel published the first issue of Loam Baby, her wine culture zine, which garnered favorable reviews from Los Angeles Times, Punch Magazine, Imbibe, Wine & Spirits, Food & Wine, Wine Spectator, among others, for its irreverent cartoons, in-depth articles, and anachronistic approach to wine journalism. Drexel continues to publish Loam Baby, and is also a freelance writer.