First Taste

Interesting bottles for interested wine lovers

A selection of notes and videos from recent tastings – click on the links to go to the relevant page

Archive of earlier notes and videos

First Taste is now on-line! The First Taste column first appeared in Wine Magazine in around 1991, and subsequently in Wine International, Wine & Spirit and finally in Harpers Wine & Spirit. It’s now transferred to the Internet, but the aim is the same. My role is rather like that of a dating agency, introducing interesting bottles to interested wine lovers. Sometimes, they won’t get on – I can live with that, it would be dreadfully boring if we all liked the same wines (more on this here). But hopefully, the result will be beautiful music and a fulfilling long-term relationship.

Something about scores. You can read more about my views on the topic in this post, but to sum up quickly, I give medals, not marks. The scale from top to bottom runs as follows:-

T (trophy) – I’d say this translated to 97-100
G (gold) – or 92-96
S (silver) – or 87-91
B (bronze) – or 82-86
C (commended) – or 77-81
0 (zero) – or 76 and below**

and I split these into five layers – S+, S(+), S, S(-) and S-, for example.

Wine merchants looking for more information about the First Taste section should send me an e-mail here.

** someone asked me, ‘Why score out of 100 and then really only from 76 onwards?’ That’s part of the reason I use the medals instead of 100 points. Wines I give ‘0′ to aren’t all of the same quality – some could be boring but drinkable, others could be actively nasty.

First Taste

Interesting bottles for interested wine lovers

A selection of notes and videos from recent tastings – click on the links to go to the relevant page

New to wine? Read this…

Subscribe Here

Subscribe via e-mail

Twitter Updates

Search this site

Previous posts