The focus of our ratings is to give you indications where to find the top wines of a region and which wines are not recommendable. It's not our aim to describe every single wine in detail including all its aromas etc., but to categorise its overall quality and potential. In future issues we'll occasionally publish complete tasting notes as well. It'll always be our main interest to cover an extraordinary wide range of premium wines from each region to guarantee an excellent overall view about its premium and renowned wineries.
Our ratings try to be as objective as possible - it's our aim to rate wines according to their quality and not to our personal taste. We consider ourselves to be very open-minded regarding different wine styles.
We also include negative ratings in our rankings - particularly European media tend to publish just their top scores and the winners - firstly they hesitate to disgrace producers with lower quality and large quantities because these are some of the most interesting advertisement partners, secondly they argue that the consumers are not interested in reading negative things - after all they distort the reality: an immense range from lousy to magnificent wines that we don't want to withhold from you. Should anybody put pressure on us because of single scores we'll immediately report about it in UNFILTERED.
Our tasters - first of all our principal taster and managing editor, Gregor Drescher - communicate their judgements by a hundred points rating system. Please realize that we generally separate the wine planet in the Northern and the Southern Hemisphere and that as a general rule all wine regions of the Southern Hemisphere are up to now rated with a two points difference compared with the Northern Hemisphere.

As an extra service we'll also judge international producers according to our hundred points rating system to give our readers hints on their overall quality and category. This classification will not be extracted from the average of our tasting notes on each winery, but will be created according to our medium-term judgement about its potential. We'll include factors like vineyard and winemaking conditions and equipment, plans and projects of future investments plus know-how and motivation in vineyard management, enology, marketing etc.