Red · Columbia Valley · United States
14 Hands Merlot
Scored from 2,879 calibrated Vivino reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the bottle is ranked. Cohort: Red · United States (1,156 wines).
Find this wine: view on Vivino · compare prices on Wine-Searcher
What reviewers say
“If malbecs are your wife, this merlot is that ugly girl from high school that turned out to be hot and called you for a one night stand after 10 years. It makes you begin to question your loyalty to your malbecs.”
From a top-rated Vivino review for this bottle.
Summary
At 14 Hands, our winemaker Keith Kenison takes a practical approach to winemaking—really letting the fruit express itself with as few manipulations as possible. Making wines that people enjoy drinking is the ultimate goal, so many decisions are made throughout the winemaking process based purely on taste. In the end result are wines that are smooth and fruit-forward, yet bold and complex.
From Columbia Valley in the United States, 14 Hands Merlot is a red. At $11.54 for the lowest 750 ml listing, it belongs to the under $15 band.
2,879 Vivino reviewers rate with enough spread for a personal baseline to be measured, and those are the ones the calibrated score reads; a separate, broader pool of 3,022 reviewers with at least two ratings each feeds the raw-average track. Its in-cohort standing is measured against 1,155 other reds from the United States, not against the corpus as a whole.
How the score was built
We compare the reviewers of this bottle against every other wine those same people reviewed. Each review is scored relative to the reviewer's own baseline — four stars from someone who hands out fives means something very different from four stars from someone who rarely goes above three. Every reviewer then counts the same, so the result is a calibrated consensus rather than a star average.
- Global percentile
- Where 14 Hands Merlot lands against every wine we rank.
- In-cohort percentile
- The same comparison narrowed to its cohort — wines of the same type from the same country. A Chilean red is judged against Chilean reds, not against Champagne. Ranked against Red · United States (1,156 wines).
- AI-adjusted percentile
- The same reviewer-normalized score, corrected for how much confidence the sample supports: thin samples are pulled toward the corpus average. Each wine keeps the share n / (n + 53) of its measured distance from the average, where n is its calibrated-reviewer count, and the result is ranked on the same scale as the global percentile.53 is the median sample size across everything we rank. Here n is 2,879.
