Red · Napa Valley · United States
Cakebread Merlot
Scored from 967 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
“What a delicious bottle of wine! A classic expression of what Napa Merlot should taste like: that ripe blackberry flavour is amazing! While it’s big and luscious, it’s also complex and balanced (with acidity).”
From a top-rated Vivino review for this bottle.
Summary
Cakebread Merlot is an American red from Napa Valley. The cheapest 750 ml listing found for it is $64.95, which puts the bottle in the $60–120 band.
The cohort it is ranked inside holds 1,156 American reds. 967 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 999 reviewers with at least two ratings each feeds the raw-average track.
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 Cakebread 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 967.
