How Vinyolo's Score Collector actually works

A plain description, because the subject has attracted some guesswork.

Vinyolo helps you keep track of the wine you own. Part of that is knowing what the critics said about a bottle sitting in your cellar. This page explains exactly how that information gets there, what we store, and who can see it.

Vinyolo publishes no reviews and no scores

There is no page on this site that lists critic scores for wines in general. No score database to browse, no ranking, no "top rated" page, no search-by-score. A search engine indexing vinyolo.com finds no critic scores, because there are none on any page it can reach.

Scores appear in one place only: on bottles a member owns, in their own cellar — visible to that member, and to anyone they have personally chosen to share their cellar with. Nowhere else.

Nothing here substitutes for reading a critic. If you want to know what a reviewer thought of a wine, you go to that reviewer. We link to the source rather than reproduce it.

What we store, and what we don't

We store a number and the code of the critic it came from — 96, WA — the way you'd write it on a cellar card. That's a fact about a bottle, the same as its vintage or its alcohol percentage.

We do not store, copy, or display tasting notes. Not an excerpt, not a paraphrase. The writing is the critic's work and it stays with the critic.

We do not collect scores that a publication has chosen to keep behind a subscription. Where a score is shown to non-subscribers only as a teaser — a partial number, a locked panel, a "subscribers only" placeholder — we skip it rather than infer it. Several well-known critics are excluded on exactly this basis. If a publication has decided the number is for paying readers, that decision is theirs to make and we respect it.

Why there's a shared pool, and how narrow it is

Wine collectors own the same wines. Thousands of people own the 2016 Ridge Monte Bello. It would be absurd for each of them to look up the same public number for the same bottle, one at a time, forever.

So when a member records a score for a wine, that record can fill in the same field for another member — if and only if that other member independently owns that exact wine and vintage. It is not a database anyone can query. It is not visible to non-members. It is not visible to members who don't own the wine. It reaches precisely the people who would otherwise have looked up the identical public number themselves, and it reaches no one else.

A wine has to be positively identified — matched to its LWIN reference code and confirmed — before it participates at all. Unconfirmed matches sit in a review queue and fill in nothing.

Attribution

Every market price carries a visible credit and a link back to Wine-Searcher. Critic codes are shown as the critic's own name and scale — a Jancis Robinson score displays as 16/20, not converted into something else. Attribution in plain text, with a link to the source, is the standard we hold ourselves to.

Where this leaves things

Members record facts about wine they own. Those facts save other owners of the identical wine from repeating identical lookups. Nothing is published, nothing is republished, no critic's writing is reproduced, and anything a publisher has put behind a paywall stays there.