Categories
Behind the Wine

We heard you! An update about your wine ratings

You’ve given us millions of wine ratings – and a mountain of feedback on how we can make those ratings more useful (to wine drinkers AND winemakers). We took two big things into account: A wine can change year to year based on the growing conditions of the vintage When you are looking at scores […]

Categories
Winemaker Post

Winemaker of the Year announcement

Our Chief Winemaker sent Angels an email on February 19th announcing the Winemaker of the Year competition. This is a contest where 4 winemakers will win $1 million in Angel funding. We use customer feedback and interactions on the site to figure out the best wines of 2015 as well as the winemaker of the year. […]

Categories
Naked Truth

How Angels Out-Amazon’ed Amazon

The wine world is stubbornly reliant on “expert opinions”, and wine drinkers end up footing the bill for a whole lot of people to tell them what they should and shouldn’t drink. But we don’t need wine advocates any more than we need pizza advocates or cheese gurus. Everybody is capable of tasting wine and […]

Categories
Behind the Wine

Do winemakers use customer feedback to improve their wines?

This is a guest post by Bill & Claudia Small of Small & Small who are releasing their newest New Zealand Sauvignon this month. You might notice that the ratings have reset on this wine (while they normally carry over from one vintage to another) and there’s a great reason for that. The Smalls have […]

Categories
Naked Truth

The truth about wine critics

There are a handful of very important people who influence how much wine costs, what wines are available in your local shops, and even what wines winemakers make. I’m going to talk about each of these things in time. But I figured I’d start with some wise words from the world’s most influential wine critic, Robert Parker. “I […]

Categories
Naked Truth

Should wine reviews be objective? The difference between wine critics and wine drinkers.

This post compares a debate between some wine pros with a debate between some Naked Angels. The difference is really interesting. Scroll to the bottom if you’re impatient. “There are some styles of wine I really dislike, and I’m not going to do the silly thing of giving them high point scores.” –Jamie Goode Wine […]