About & method
Bottleline is a reference for people who want to know what is actually in the bottle. This page explains what we publish, what we don't, and why.
Most drinks writing is either an advert or a guess. A tasting note gets copied from a press release, a founding date gets lifted from a Wikipedia page that got it from a blog that got it from nowhere, and after enough repetition it reads like established fact. We have been caught by exactly that, so the method here is built around not being caught by it again.
What a score means
A Bottleline score out of 100 means somebody here poured the bottle and drank it. That is the entire qualification. It is not a blend of other people's reviews, it is not an estimate from the style, and it is not generated.
If nobody here has tasted a bottle, it says Not yet rated. That is not a placeholder waiting to be filled in with something plausible — it is the honest state of the thing, and it stays that way until a real tasting happens.
What we publish without tasting
Strength, origin, producer, style and age statement are matters of record rather than opinion, so those go up whether or not anyone has tasted the bottle. Where a bottle is sold at different strengths in different countries, we leave the figure blank and say so, rather than printing whichever number we happened to find first.
Tasting notes are opinion, so they only appear in one of two forms: written by someone here who tasted it, or quoted from the producer and clearly credited to them. There is no third category.
When sources disagree
More often than you would expect, five sources turn out to be one source copied four times. Where a claim is genuinely contested — a founding year, a first release — we mark it as disputed on the page instead of silently picking a side.
Every producer story ends with its sources listed, and with a still to confirm section naming the things we could not verify. That section is the point, not an apology for the article.
Independence
We do not sell alcohol. We are not paid by producers, we do not accept samples in exchange for coverage, and there are no affiliate links on this site. If that changes, it will be disclosed on this page before it appears anywhere else.
Corrections
If something here is wrong we want to fix it, and we would rather hear it from you than not hear it at all. That goes double if you work for a producer we have written about.
Age
You must be 21 or over to use Bottleline. The check on entry is stored on your own device for thirty days; nothing is sent to us and no account is created. Please drink responsibly.