For readers

What this is

barberry.io is a wine notebook I keep, slowly. It started as a place to remember what I drank and what I thought of it, and it grew from there. These days it holds tasting notes, reports from blind tastings and dinners, sketches of producers I keep coming back to, and the occasional digression. There is no schedule. Things appear when I have something worth writing down.

What you'll find here

The home page is a feed of the most recent things — that's usually the easiest way in. Beyond it, the site has a few main sections:

• Posts — the journal. Tasting reports, event write-ups, the occasional longer piece. Best if you'd rather read than browse.
• Wines — every bottle that's been written about, searchable and filterable. Useful if you're hunting for something specific or curious about the kinds of wines we drink. The catalogue is mostly wine but not only wine: sake lives here too, marked as such, with a beverage filter appearing once there's something to filter.
• Producers — the people behind the bottles. Worth a look if a name keeps catching your eye and you want to read more.
• Events — past tastings, scored and annotated. This is where the community side of the site lives.
• Events — what's coming up. Open tastings, dinners, anything you might want to join. Sign up directly from this page. Charity evenings carry a donation link right on the event page — every hryvnia goes to the cause, and the jar is open even if you can't attend.

How to read the scoring

Scores here are personal. There is no Parker scale, no 100-point ladder of authority. A wine gets a number on a five-point scale (with two decimal places of precision) that reflects how much the taster actually liked it on the night, with the room and the food and the company taken into account.

If you think in 100-point terms, the conversion is straightforward: multiply the score by ten and add fifty. A 3.5 is an 85, a 4.0 is a 90, a 5.0 is a 100. Treat the numbers as a rough sketch — the words around them are usually more honest, and a low score from someone who knows the style they're tasting tells you something different than one from someone who doesn't.

How to find a specific wine or producer

The search boxes on /wines and /producers take name fragments and accents in stride, so a half-remembered grape or village is usually enough. The posts page accepts tag filters if you'd like to narrow things down to a region, a style, or a producer. The catalogue is small enough that browsing often beats searching.

The wines page also carries a row of cuts — one-tap slices like fresh prices, best value, steals, under $25, and this year's finds. They lean on prices re-checked within the past week by our shop crawl, so the value numbers you see are ones you can plausibly still act on rather than deals from years past. One honest caveat: we follow only a few shops, so a fresh price is a strong hint the wine is still out there, not a stock promise. Each cut lives in the address bar, so a link like /wines?cut=steal drops you straight into that slice.

Once you are on a wine, other vintages and releases of the same cuvee sit right under the name as a row of pills, each with its score, so you can hop between years without going back to the list. Further down the page a Releases table lines them up with score, your own score if you rated them, QPR, and price; More from the producer below it covers the rest of the range.

Keep it on your phone

The site installs to a phone's home screen like an app. On iOS, open it in Safari, tap Share, then Add to Home Screen; on Android, Chrome offers Add to Home screen from its menu (sometimes as an install banner). You get a Barberry icon and a full-screen view without browser chrome. Handy if you check in often, and it is where the mobile experience is headed.

Want to do more than read?

There is more to the site than reading. Some people show up as convives — regular tasters whose scores get folded into event reports. Others contribute notes, keep their own cellars, or host tastings of their own. If any of that sounds appealing, the For contributors guide explains what's on offer once you've been given access. To begin with, register an account and we'll figure out the rest from there. Registration is reviewed by hand, so it may take a day or two before you hear back.

Get in touch

Questions, corrections, or a wine you think I should try? Drop me a line or find me on Telegram.