How we choose

Pago de Carraovejas 2020 Ribera del Duero	Bhilar 'Thousand Mils' Blanco 2020 Rioja Alavesa	Llopart 'Panoramic' Brut Corpinnat

Most online wine lists are built by subtraction. Take a distributor's whole catalogue, remove what won't sell, publish the rest. It is why so many shops carry the same wines, and why so few of them can tell you why any individual bottle is there.

We work the other way round. A wine goes on this list one at a time, and it has to earn it.

We dropped Banfi's La Pettegola — a perfectly good Vermentino, and one that sells. We dropped it because you can buy it in a supermarket. If a wine sits on a shelf in every large Tesco, we add nothing by also stocking it. You do not need us for that bottle.

The same rule turns away most of what we are offered. Competent is not enough. Well-made is not enough. There has to be a reason the wine exists — a producer doing something specific, a site that tastes like itself, a style you cannot find elsewhere at the price.

We taste them

Nothing goes on this list from a spec sheet alone. We taste as much of it as we can — at the importer's tastings, at producer visits, and at our own kitchen table, alongside whatever else is competing for the same slot at the same price. That last part matters more than it sounds. A wine tasted on its own almost always shows well. A wine tasted against three rivals shows what it actually is.

There are two of us and a great deal of wine, so we cannot get to every bottle ourselves, and we are not going to pretend otherwise. Where we cannot, we lean on a small number of people whose palates we have learned to trust over years. The rule does not change: if nobody we trust can vouch for a wine, it does not go on.

Sometimes we taste a wine we have wanted to list for years and it simply is not there in that vintage. It waits.

We choose the vintage, not just the wine

A label is not a promise. The same producer, the same vineyard, the same winemaking — and two consecutive years can taste like different wines. A cool, late-ripening season gives you tension and length. A hot one gives you weight and sometimes not much else. Reviewers know this, which is why their scores move so sharply year to year.

So we choose by vintage. We read what the growing season actually did, we taste the release rather than assuming last year's form carries over, and we put the year on the page. If a producer we carry has an off year, we skip it and wait for the next one.

We check the critic scores — properly

This is the part worth explaining, because it is where the wine trade is quietly careless.

When a shop prints a score under a bottle, that number very often belongs to a different vintage. It gets pasted forward from last year's release, or lifted from a data feed nobody checked. We have found it again and again.

Other things we have caught: three merchants showing the same critic score with an identical note, disagreeing with each other about the year, one of them reusing that note on a different vintage with a different score. An importer's own page for a 2021 carrying notes labelled 2023. A Barolo where the producer's own ratings page assigns the score to the previous vintage.

A missing score on one of our pages usually means we looked and could not verify it — not that the wine is not good. Some producers we love have no scores at all. Small Burgundy growers barely get reviewed. That has no bearing on whether the wine is worth drinking, and we would rather say so than invent a number.

Where the wines come from

Mostly Spain, and unapologetically so. Ed is Spanish, and the depth of quality coming out of Ribera del Duero, Rioja, Bierzo, Galicia and Priorat right now is not matched anywhere at the price. But the list runs well beyond it — Italy, Burgundy, the Rhône, Greece, South Africa, New Zealand, Argentina, Lebanon.

We buy through a small number of importers we trust rather than chasing every deal. It makes for a narrower list. That is the point.