DrinksAdvisor recommends places to sleep and things to book in the world’s wine regions, and earns a commission when you book through our links. That combination only works if you can see how the decisions get made. This page sets out what we check, what we cannot check, and what happens when we get something wrong.
Who is behind this
DrinksAdvisor is published by Alex A., who is responsible for everything on it. It is small and independent. No estate, hotel or tour operator has any say in what appears here, and none of them can buy a place on a page.
How we research
We work remotely, from published sources. We are not an inspection service and we are not going to imply that we are: we have not slept in every room described on this site. A site that pretended otherwise would be lying to you about the one thing you cannot check.
What we do read, for every property or experience we write about:
- the producer’s own published material
- the listing held by the booking partner, including its guest reviews
- the register of the regional appellation or consortium, where one exists
- the database of any certification body whose logo a producer claims
- the wine press, for context on the estate, the vintage and the region
Where a fact comes from one of those, we say so on the page. Where a judgment is ours, we write it as one — “we think”, “in our view” — so you can weigh it as an opinion rather than mistake it for a measurement.
How a place gets onto a list
Four tests. A property has to pass all four.
- It has to be bookable. If you cannot actually reserve it as a traveler, it is not a recommendation, it is a photograph.
- It has to be genuinely connected to wine. A hotel with a good wine list is not a vineyard stay. We look for a working producer — vines, a cellar, a family or a team making something on site.
- It has to be verifiable. If we cannot confirm the basics from a named source — that it exists, that it has rooms, that it is open to the public — it does not go in, however appealing it looks.
- It has to earn its place in the specific list it is in. A round-up of harvest-season stays is not the same list as a round-up of places with a Michelin restaurant. We would rather publish six properties that fit than ten that pad the number.
What “best” means in our headlines
“Best” is a claim about fit, not a universal ranking. A round-up is ordered by what we believe is worth your money for the trip the article describes — never by what pays us most. Where two properties are genuinely close, we say so rather than manufacture a difference to justify the order.
How we describe the way the wine is made
This is the part we are most careful about, because these words are used loosely almost everywhere else, and the readers who care about them tend to know more than the people writing about them.
- Certified Organic — applied only where the producer holds certification, such as the EU organic logo or USDA Organic. We name the scheme.
- Biodynamic — applied only with Demeter or Biodyvin certification.
- Vegan-friendly — applied only with V-Label certification, or the producer’s own published statement about the fining agents they use.
- Sustainable — applied only with a named regional scheme such as Equalitas, SQNPI or Napa Green. We name which one, because they do not all mean the same thing.
- Natural / low-intervention — this label has no legal definition anywhere in the world. We apply it in exactly two cases: when the producer describes their own winemaking that way in their own published material, or when they hold France’s voluntary Vin Méthode Nature mark. We say which of the two it is. We never apply it because a wine tasted a particular way to somebody.
If a certification lapses, the label comes off the page at the next update.
Ratings and scores
We do not invent them. Where a score appears next to a property, it belongs to the booking partner and is labelled with that partner’s name, so you can go and read the reviews behind it.
We do not publish a DrinksAdvisor score, and we do not add review markup to our pages, because we do not have a body of verified guest reviews to support one. If that ever changes, this page will change with it before the scores appear.
Prices
Prices are always shown as “from” a figure, because that is what they are: a starting rate set by the booking partner, which moves with the season, the room and the day you happen to look. We check them when we publish and again when we update an article. The price on the booking site is the one that counts.
Photographs
A picture of one property is never used to illustrate another. Photographs of a property come from the booking partner that lists it, or from the estate’s own press materials with its permission.
Where we have neither, you will see a plain graphic rather than a generic photograph of somebody else’s vineyard. An anonymous row of vines tells you nothing about the place you are considering, and using one to fill a gap is a small dishonesty that adds up.
How the money works
Some links on this site are affiliate links: if you book through one we may earn a commission, and you pay the same rate you would pay going direct. It does not decide what we list or the order we list it in. The full explanation, including who we work with, is in our Affiliate Disclosure.
Updates and corrections
Every article carries an Updated date rather than a publication date, because on travel content the useful question is when the information was last checked.
If you find something wrong — a price that was never real, a certification we have misread, a room count that changed, an estate that has closed — write to us at privacy@drinksadvisor.com. We would rather fix it than defend it, and where a correction changes the substance of a page we say on the page that we made it.
What this page is not
It is not a promise that we are never wrong. It is a description of a method, published so that you can hold us to it. A site that earns money from your bookings should be judged on whether it does what it says here — and you cannot judge that unless it says it.