Red · California · United States
Josh Cellars Merlot
Scored from 2,539 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
“No pretense, approachable, easy-going, but same time almost classic Merlot. Smell is lovely mixture of mocca, vanilla and sweet tabbaco. Wine is smooth without rough corners. Medium-bodied, velvety and juicy. Plum, red cherry with some spicy finish.”
From a top-rated Vivino review for this bottle.
Summary
The bouquet of this Merlot is complex with violets, sweet plums, rosemary, and vanilla bean. On the palate, the wine is velvety and soft in texture, with flavors of juicy plums, blackberries, and Bing cherries, and a long cocoa powder finish and fine tannins.
Josh Cellars Merlot is an American red from California. At $14.99 for the lowest 750 ml listing, it belongs to the under $15 band.
1,155 other reds from the United States form the cohort it is ranked inside. The calibrated figure is built from 2,539 reviewers whose rating history varies enough to place their own average. A broader pool of 2,652 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 Josh Cellars 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 2,539.
