The Blue Roses

I’ve been scoring wines for my database, and providing context for those notes and scores on my website paulcaputo.wine. I focus on the technical qualities of a wine, such as its aroma, its flavour, structure, texture, tension, balance, energy and length.

I wanted to create an annual awards program that builds on this work by allowing me to make helpful recommendations to normal wine buyers. While my judgements of a wine’s quality are important, scores can conspire to hide or lose the stories behind a wine and where it comes from. I see my role as an independent critic not only to provide objective analysis of a wine’s quality, but also to help promote wines that give genuine interest beyond purely its technical qualities.

The best wines in the world score highly in all these areas. Needless to say, wines that achieve all of these components are often amongst the best wines in the world. Yet, how useful is it to recommend things with a price tag in the hundreds, or even thousands of pounds? Not so much.