Emily, Jamie, and Doug ask how critics approach the process of judging the quality of an individual wine. The three talk about ratings and marking systems and question their validity. Are they a useful shorthand or a distraction from the real thing (the taste of the wine)? We question what happens when critics taste prestigious cuvées and rare wines and whether feel confident enough to give these low marks when they truly disappoint.They talk about collective tasting and the dynamic of the tasting panel, where a group comes together to calibrate their taste. Finally, they discuss the language we use to describe wine, how we try to capture abstract qualities such beauty and integrity in wines in humble words, and how also wines that gain lower scores on a marking scale might well be the ones we prefer to drink in the end! We conclude that a wine is not necessarily immediately knowable, and that one can only truly evaluate one when one has spent proper time with it. The wines tasted in this episode are a thrilling natural Tsolikouri 2023 from Makaridze in Imereti, Georgia and remark on its qualities of energy and minerality. Later on, we open a bottle of 2007 Bandol Rouge from Château de Pibarnon and are impressed by its grace and comparative youthfulness.