How do we choose a wine?

By Jamie Goode | 24th June 2025

The perennial problem for wine lovers is this. How do we choose which wine to buy? Go into just about every restaurant and you will be handed a wine list chock full of options, and usually very little guidance. Most often, it’s a list of the names of the wines: producer/wine name/grape variety/region and vintage. If there is a description of each, it’s often a very generic tasting note that does little to inform.

And go into a wine shop or a supermarket and you will be faced with a wall of wine. It’s a little better than the situation in the restaurant where you have just words to guide you: here you have the bottle in front of you so at least you can see what it looks like. This can be quite a useful, if indirect, buying cue. Of course, the wine bottles tend to have back labels which pitch the wine at you, but I’m not sure most people read them. They use cues like grape variety or region and then factor in the price. But it’s still hard to make a choice, even for a professional like me who tastes a lot of wines and has travelled extensively around the wine world.

This is where the human element comes in. If you are at a high-end restaurant, there will likely be a sommelier on duty who knows the list and is able to give advice. Some sommeliers do a great job, others are too busy, or don’t read the table or listen to the customer very well, or they are trying to push certain wines over others. Many people don’t want to ask a sommelier for help because they are afraid that they won’t be able to articulate what they are asking for in the right way. A lot of people know which wines they really like when they taste them but find it hard to explain in words what it is that they like about these wines. We have a poverty of descriptors when it comes to flavours, and this makes communicating about the taste of wine difficult. In a specialist wine shop with staff who know the range, it can be very rewarding to build a relationship with the staff who then get to know your palate and make useful suggestions about which wines you might like to try next. But this isn’t an option open to everyone.

I actually think getting to know your local independent wine merchant is one of the best ways to buy wine. Yes, you might be able to find a particular wine a little more cheaply on the Internet but reward your wine merchant with your custom because it’s an excellent way to navigate a complicated consumer category.

Another way of sifting through the masses of wines out there is through third-party validation from professionals. This comes in the way of medals from wine competitions, or scores from critics, or ratings on an app.

There are quite a few wine competitions out there, and some are better than others. The main factor behind this variation is that it’s very hard to sit down in front of flight after flight of wines, not knowing their identity, and then assessing them well. Even experienced tasters don’t perform perfectly in these settings, and that’s why assessments are often done through panels, where everyone tastes through the flight and then discusses the wines. Good competitions produce good results. Bad ones have a level of randomness to their results. Are stickers on a bottle a good guide? In the UK the two competitions of merit are the Decanter World Wine Awards and the International Wine Challenge, so look out for these (conflict of interest: I’m involved with the International Wine Challenge).

Critic reviews are a good way to navigate the complexity of wine, but not all critics are going to work for you as a trusted guide. That’s because they have stylistic preferences that may or may not match with yours. So, before you allow them to guide you, try to get a feel for the sorts of wines that they prefer, and find a critic whose palate matches yours. Unfortunately, for less expensive wines, critics tend not to bother assessing them, so this isn’t something that will guide you round the supermarket.

Then there are apps, with the best known being Vivino. Some people get on very well with these, and they cover more wines than critics do. The downside is that, like TripAdvisor, this is all about the pooled wisdom of the crowd. It has limited utility: it might give you some good solid, safe advice, but anything away from the norm will tend to be punished.

Why is it that wine is so complicated? Can’t it be simplified? The real problem is the scale of production, which for interesting wine tends to be small. And each winery might make seven or eight wines. South Africa, for example, has 522 wineries, and 70% of them crush fewer than 500 tons a year. There are a lot of wines out there looking for a home!

And if retailers and restaurants try to shorten their lists or reduce their offerings, in a bid to help consumers, then they are less trusted by consumers. Customers think that this isn’t a serious wine offering and will often go elsewhere. It’s very hard to simplify this situation.

The best solution is one of trust. In a good restaurant you trust that whoever is making the selection is doing it for the very best reasons. In a shop, you trust that the buyer has done the same: they have selected the wine on its merits, and every wine they have chosen has passed the test. Of course, it’s possible to learn the names of some of the leading producers, a more reliable way of selecting a wine than choosing by region or grape variety. But you can only buy the wine that is in front of you, and you won’t always find your favoured producers. So find a restaurant or shop you trust before you spend your money, and then you might be pleasantly surprised and make some new discoveries by leveraging the expertise and care of others.