Cork & Curve exists to help readers drink well — from the right producer, in the right region, with the right context. We treat that as a responsibility, not a tagline. These are the rules we apply to every page we publish.
1. No paid placements in editorial
No vineyard, tasting room, wine bar, restaurant, retailer, school, tour operator, distillery, museum or hotel can pay to be included, ranked, or featured in our editorial. There is no PR-pitched inclusion. There is no "sponsored producer" tier. Producer-supplied press kits are read for fact-checking, never accepted as the basis for inclusion.
2. Comped tastings and press trips
Editors may, at their discretion, accept comped tastings, press visits or producer-hosted trips in the course of research. If they do, the resulting piece discloses it in the byline area. A comp does not buy a positive verdict — a producer who hosted a comped tasting and disappointed gets written up that way.
3. Affiliate links
We may include affiliate links to booking partners (wine hotels, tour operators, online retailers). Affiliate revenue plays no part in editorial selection. If a partner property's wine programme is bad, it gets that verdict and the affiliate link goes away.
4. Sourcing — the source-URL tier ladder
Every vineyard, cuvée and venue on Cork & Curve is sourced through a six-tier ladder. We always anchor to the highest tier available:
- Tier 1 — Producer's own current site. The
domain the producer themselves operates (e.g.
bürklin-wolf.de,fefinanes.com,marchesi-antinori.com). - Tier 2 — Consortium roster subpage. The
appellation body's page that names the producer (e.g.
vdp.de/de/weingueter/robert-weil,consorziovinochianti.it/produttore/...). - Tier 3 — Regional tourism listing. The
destination's wine-route directory (e.g.
visit.alsace/en/winery/...,tokajwineregion.com/...). - Tier 4 — Critic profile. Decanter, Wine Advocate, Vinous, James Suckling, Jancis Robinson, Tim Atkin, or Wine Spectator profile that names the producer.
- Tier 5 — Aggregator profile. Wine-Searcher, Wein-Plus, Vivino, CellarTracker, Liv-ex producer entry.
- Tier 6 — Wikipedia / Wikidata. Last resort.
If we can't find at least Tier 6 for a candidate producer, we don't publish it. The corpus is the product; we'd rather omit an unverifiable estate than publish a fabricated one.
5. Updates and corrections
Every entity page carries a Verified on stamp showing the
date our desk last confirmed name, address, classification, ownership
and current operating status. The stamp is sourced from the
verified-block checked_on field on every entity — it is
not a generic timestamp. When a producer's website changes ownership
or rebrands, we walk the source ladder again rather than holding the
old citation.
6. AI assistance
We use AI tools for research synthesis, draft generation, structural editing and cross-source fact-checking. We do not publish AI-generated content as editorial. Every claim on this site — DOCG / VDP / DOC classification, hectarage, ownership, biodynamic certification, critic scores — has been verified by a human editor against the source-URL ladder before publication. Our entity-existence verification gate independently web-searches every producer before it ships, and drops candidates the multi-source search can't corroborate.
7. Conflicts of interest
Editors disclose any personal or commercial relationship with a producer they are writing about. Where the relationship is material, the piece is reassigned.
8. Scoring methodology
Every entity on Cork & Curve carries an editorial score between 1.0 and 5.0, shown as "★ 4.3" next to the entry name. The score is the Cork & Curve editorial verdict, derived from:
- Producer-side fundamentals: hectarage, vine age, pedigree of the producer family or oenologist, classification of the vineyards, organic / biodynamic / natural status with certifying body named, and the producer's track record across vintages.
- Critic recognition: scores from named publications (Decanter, Wine Advocate, Vinous, Wine Spectator, James Suckling, Jancis Robinson, Tim Atkin, IWSC, etc.) with each score's reviewer + vintage + year of review attributed. Generic "highly rated" without a tuple is not used.
- Distinctiveness and canonical execution: how essential a producer or cuvée is to its appellation's story, and how well it executes the appellation's classical style.
- Recency and current form: a producer strong in the 1990s but slipping today scores lower than its legacy reputation. We weight sources from the last 18 months.
We do not cache or display third-party star averages (Google, TripAdvisor, Vivino consumer scores). The number you see is ours. A producer at 5.0 is defining and essential to the appellation's identity; 4.5 to 4.9 is a marquee estate; 4.0 to 4.4 is a strong recommend; 3.5 to 3.9 is a solid pick within the producer's tier. Below 3.0 is rare and only included when topic coverage requires category breadth.
9. Entity-existence verification
Before any producer, restaurant or wine bar enters the corpus, our research process runs a multi-source existence check: the producer must be independently corroborated in at least two of producer site, consortium roster, wine-trade directory, regional tourism listing, Wikipedia, or Google Maps / OpenStreetMap. Candidates that fail this check are dropped before the page is written — even when their addresses geocode and their slugs look plausible. This is the only exception to our REPLACE-NEVER-DELETE policy: unverifiable existence.
Reporting an issue
If you spot a factual error, a closed producer, a wrong-region attribution or anything else that needs a correction, the contact page reaches the editorial desk directly.