Red · Napa Valley · United States
Duckhorn Napa Valley Merlot
Scored from 9,387 calibrated Vivino reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the bottle is ranked. Cohort: Red · United States (1,156 wines).
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What reviewers say
“Iconic Duckhorn wine that claims to be a merlot, but is actually made in the Bdx style of blending 82% merlot with 16% CS & small parts of CF, PV & Malbec. A glistening dark garnet pour, the nose is an amalgam of perfumed earth, forest floor & rich ripe fruit.”
From a top-rated Vivino review for this bottle.
Summary
Aromatic, with vibrant red fruit layers of Rainier cherry and spiced plum, as well as notes of liquorice, tobacco leaf, cardamom and thyme. Hints of cedar, leather and savory spice from ageing in French oak barrels contribute depth and nuance, while a streak of uplifting acidity adds dimension to this wine's smooth velvety texture. Dusty tannins frame a sophisticated finish.
Duckhorn Napa Valley Merlot is an American red from Napa Valley. The cheapest 750 ml listing found for it is $32.99, which puts the bottle in the $30–60 band.
Its in-cohort standing is measured against 1,155 other reds from the United States, not against the corpus as a whole. The calibrated figure is built from 9,387 reviewers whose rating history varies enough to place their own average. A broader pool of 9,700 reviewers with two or more ratings feeds the raw-average track instead.
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 Duckhorn Napa Valley 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 9,387.
