How a wine
earns its code.

Blind tasting at the producer.

Adrian visits the winery — usually 5 to 15 across Moldova in any given month — and tastes barrel and bottle samples blind. No labels, no producer narration, no sentiment. Just glass, light, and the wine.

If a sample shows promise, three bottles from the relevant lot get pulled at random and sealed for the panel.

• · No fees paid by producer to enter the process.
• · No "tasting bottles" prepared specially — only random pulls from the actual lot.
• · Adrian's notes go in a sealed envelope, opened only after the panel.

Panel review.

A rotating panel of three to five professional tasters — drawn from the network of 250 international wine experts Adrian works with — scores the wine cold against the variety's tier. They don't know the producer, the vintage, or each other's scores until they finish.

Two-thirds must say yes. If the panel splits 3-2, the wine doesn't earn the code. The standard is binary on purpose: either you'd recommend the bottle to a friend without explaining anything, or you wouldn't.

Batch validation.

A wine that wows once is not enough. Three random bottles from the same lot are tasted on three different days — sometimes weeks apart — to verify that the lot's quality holds. Consistency beats peak.

If any of the three bottles shows fault — oxidation, brett, cork taint, sediment irregularities, anything — the lot fails and we don't ship that batch. The producer is told what we found, the panel notes are shared, and we move on.

It's exhausting. It's also the only honest way to do this.

Code & ship.

The wine earns its shape, color, and batch number. The label is printed. A QR code linking to the panel notes goes on the back. The bottle goes live in the catalogue.

Every batch is publicly traceable: scan the QR, see the producer, the harvest date, the panel scores, the panelist names (with consent), and the exact lot the bottle came from. No fog. No fluff.