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Vivino Confirms: Its 5 Star Rating System is Legit

Wine is one of the most expensive purchases that you usually can’t try, before you buy. So, we rely on expert ratings for validation before we make the leap. But how do we decide on the over 1 million wines that don’t have a rating?

Vivino is saying: trust the community. The world’s most popular wine review app just revealed that its crowdsourced ratings are consistent with expert opinions. In its recent study, Vivino found that a 4.0 Vivino rating correlates with a 90 point expert rating. The experts included Wine Enthusiast, Robert Parker, Stephen Tanzer, and Antonio Galloni.

Another interesting finding: wines rated 4.0 are better than 85% of all other Vivino wines, and those rated 4.5 are better than 99%. This makes sense to us — as frequent Vivino users, we rarely see wines with a 4.5 rating — and if they do have one, they generally just have fewer reviews.

Vivino also revealed that the average rating on its platform is 3.6 out of 5. If this seems high, just think about it this way: Vivino is a social network. People might not want to make the effort to share a terrible wine they’ve consumed with friends.

So, what’s The Wine Daily take on Vivino ratings?

  1. While we sometimes disagree with higher Vivino reviews (4.0 or above), we have never disagreed with the lower ones. So, at a minimum, use Vivino as a tool to avoid bad purchases. This is particularly valuable when you’re tasked with picking wine for the table.
  2. Keep review count in mind. Just 9% of Vivino’s scanned bottles have 10 reviews or more. Any fewer than 10 ratings is not enough to be conclusive. However, we usually agree with ratings backed by hundreds of reviews.
  3. Ensure you have the correct vintage selected. Vivino will provide a default rating that averages across vintages, but this can be less accurate particularly with smaller-production wines that are more vintage-driven.

There are still a few questions remaining. In calculating its overall rating, does Vivino deprioritize ratings from reviewers that are deemed less credible by the community? Does it prioritize recency higher in the calculation? We’ll just have to await the next Vivino comment on its ratings system. Read the full article on Vivino.