Wine Reviews Get 100-Point Ratings in InVintory

Reviewing a bottle in InVintory now covers more of what you actually think about a wine, and takes less time to write down. Here's a full walkthrough of what changed.

What's New in InVintory's Wine Reviews

The review screen now covers four things about every bottle: whether you liked it, whether it's at the right point in its life to drink, whether it was worth the price, and a detailed account of how it actually tasted.

Rate How You Felt About It

Every review starts with a simple call: Disliked, Liked, or Loved. Below that, a Repurchase checkbox lets you flag bottles worth buying again, which is a fast way to build a shortlist of proven favorites without digging back through old notes later.

Rate Maturity

The Maturity selector lets you mark a bottle as Hold, Drink, or Past Prime at the moment you open it. This is a direct, in-the-moment record of where that specific bottle actually was in its life, which is more precise than relying on a general drinking window alone, since it captures how the bottle you opened actually showed, not just when it was theoretically supposed to be ready.

Score Value for Price

A five-star Value for Price rating gives you a quick, personal record of whether a bottle was worth what you paid, independent of how much you liked drinking it. A wine can score high on enjoyment and low on value if it was overpriced for what it delivered, or the reverse for an unexpectedly great bottle at a modest price.

Add a 100-Point Rating

For collectors who think in the familiar 50-to-100 scoring scale used by professional critics, InVintory now supports a direct 100-point rating on every review. This sits alongside the star rating and your other notes, so you can score a bottle the way you're used to scoring it, whichever system that is.

Describe What You Actually Tasted

This is where the review gets genuinely detailed. Sensory notes are organized into categories covering fruit character (tree and stone fruit, citrus, tropical, red fruit, black fruit), plus floral, earth and herb, mineral, lactic, and oak and spice notes. Select whichever apply to the bottle in front of you, building a tasting note from real categories instead of trying to remember the right wine-tasting vocabulary on the spot.

What if I'm not sure how to describe a wine's structure?

Structure ratings (body, acidity, sweetness, and tannin) each come with plain-language descriptions to guide your selection, not just a label. Acidity ranges from Racy ("causes an immediate pucker like lemon") through Crisp, Balanced, Broad, to Low ("tastes round or syrupy like a baked peach"). Tannin ranges from None through Low, Medium, to High ("firm, chewy, and dries the gums significantly"). Body runs Light, Medium, or Full, each described by how the wine actually feels in your mouth rather than a technical term you'd need to already know.

This matters most for newer collectors who know what they're tasting but haven't built up the vocabulary yet. The descriptions do the translating for you.

Write Reviews Faster With Transcribe and Rewrite

Detailed reviews take longer to write, so two new tools cut that time down.

Transcribe lets you speak your thoughts out loud right after tasting, while the impression is still fresh, and turns your spoken notes into a written review automatically. This is especially useful at the table, where typing a detailed note mid-meal is impractical but a quick verbal impression isn't.

Rewrite cleans up spelling and grammar in a note you've already written, or shortens a longer review down to the essentials, without you having to edit it by hand.

What a Good Review Habit Looks Like Over Time

The value of any single review is modest. The value of a hundred reviews, written consistently in the same structured format, compounds considerably. You start noticing patterns you wouldn't catch from memory alone: that you consistently rate high-tannin reds lower than you expect to going in, or that a particular producer's bottles tend to need more time than you initially give them. None of that shows up from one tasting note. It shows up from a body of them, tracked the same way each time.

The improvements covered above (Transcribe, Rewrite, and the more structured rating fields) exist mainly to lower the friction of building that habit, since a review you write in thirty seconds right after tasting is far more likely to happen consistently than one you postpone until you have time to write something thorough.

Why This Matters for Tracking Your Collection

A review is only useful later if it actually captures what happened. Rating maturity at the moment you open a bottle builds a real record of how your drinking windows are performing over time, not just a theoretical estimate. Sensory notes tied to specific categories make your tasting history searchable and comparable across bottles in a way that a free-text note alone can't match. For more on how drinking windows work day to day, see our full guide to the InVintory home screen, where Ready to Drink and your recent activity live alongside these reviews.

If you're building out sensory vocabulary intentionally, whether for a specific varietal or as a general habit, these structured notes also make it easier to spot your own patterns over time: which acidity levels you consistently rate highest, which tannin range you tend to call "too much," and so on.

Every review you write adds to a record that gets more useful the longer you keep it, and the new tools make that record easier to build honestly, in the moment, rather than reconstructed from memory later.

Try the new review experience on your next bottle.

Write Your Next Review →

FAQ

Can I use both a 100-point rating and a star rating on the same review?

Yes. The 100-point rating and the five-star Value for Price rating are separate fields, so you can use both on the same review without one replacing the other.

Does Transcribe work if I'm reviewing a wine in a noisy restaurant?

Transcribe is designed for spoken input right after tasting. Results are generally more reliable in a quieter setting, though it's built to handle normal conversational background noise.

Do I have to fill out every sensory note category?

No. Select whichever categories actually apply to the bottle you're reviewing. A shorter, accurate review is more useful than a long one padded with notes that don't really describe what you tasted.

Start capturing more detail on every bottle you open.

Get Started With InVintory →