Mattinson's Value Rankings

Every wine on this site gets a score, and every day more wine reviews are added. This page applies a hard, non-manipulated calculation to each review, each price and each score, and produces a ranking: price per point.

Only points above 88 count, because a wine has to clear that bar before I'd tell you to buy it. A $35 wine scoring 94 earns six points above the line, so it costs $5.83 per point. A $60 wine scoring 96 earns eight, at $7.50 per point. The lower the number, the better the value. That's the whole method. This method doesn't care whether a wine is famous, and it doesn't care whether it's cheap; it cares whether the quality justifies the price. Only.

What this means, in practice, is that a $28 wine and a $130 wine can and will compete on the same list. A $130 wine can absolutely make it into these “value” ranks – but only if it's brilliant. Nobody else ranks wine this way. Every wine is a contender; it’s not either/or.

I've worked in the wine media for over 25 years. It's surprising how seldom these value calculations are done. Value is almost always calculated below a certain price, and rarely across the full spectrum of reviews, rarer still within categories. Even when value lists are written – and I'm guilty of this myself – there's a "vibe thing" in play: lists are made from memory-of-wines-tasted, and quick searches. This page is not that. Or it is, but with a calculator doing the searching, the rating, the ranking – and with wine quality a paramount concern rather than a secondary one. There is no compromise here; there is full independence.

The lists here run by a number of parameters, because it's more fun that way, and more useful. They run by grape variety — chardonnay, grenache, shiraz, pinot noir and the rest — and by time period: the wines I've reviewed this week, this month, this year, or ever. Prices are the recommended retail prices at the time of review; real-world discounts are not factored in. Every wine in every list links to its full review.