Our Winery Ranking Method
ChoiceWineries.com is the preeminent source for US winery rankings.
We’ve answered the following questions about how we rank wineries in this article…
- What are we ranking?
- How do we rank wineries?
- What is the CW score?
- How often do we refresh our rankings?
1. What is ChoiceWineries.com ranking?
We’re ranking wineries on the experience that a visitor to a winery can expect to have.
There are multiple elements to this, including…
- The quality of the wine served
- The atmosphere/ambiance/setting
- The service
- Other intangibles
2. How do we rank wineries?
Data.
We manually collect data from many sources. These include: customer reviews, expert wine reviews, social signals, and more.
We then clean and analyze our data sets.
From there, we rank each winery relative to their peers across multiple components of the data we source. We weight some components more heavily than others based on our team’s analysis, then combine the scores from these disparate components and data sources together to yield one clean score per winery.
The result is our proprietary ChoiceWineries.com CW Score. A CW Score accompanies each winery’s review within our best wineries in articles.
3. What is the CW Score?
CW Scores primarily range from 0 to 100. Our scoring logic rewards certain traits with multipliers, which can result in scores over 100. These are extremely rare. In fact, in our inaugural winery rankings only 6 of the 6,700+ wineries we examined scored north of 100.
The higher the CW score, the better winery experience a visitor should expect (relative to other wineries).
We only score wineries where we’re able to gather sufficient data points. Therefore, some wineries will be excluded from receiving a score and subsequently appearing in any of our rankings. Excluded wineries are largely those that are new, or those for which we’re unable to gather sufficient data.
4. How often do we refresh our rankings?
Our inaugural scores and rankings were compiled in 2021 and completed in 2022.
We’re currently targeting the first refresh of our winery rankings in 2024, and then plan to refresh every 24 months after.
This is to allow enough new data points to materially impact our rankings and scores.
Feel free to contact us with any additional questions regarding our winery rankings or scores.