Fortified · Madeira · Portugal
Rare Wine Co. Thomas Jefferson Madeira (Special Reserve)
Scored from 35 calibrated Vivino reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the bottle is ranked. Cohort: Fortified · Portugal (1,422 wines).
Find this wine: view on Vivino · compare prices on Wine-Searcher
Tasting profile
A richly layered Madeira showing raisin, fig, caramel, toffee, and toasted nut alongside brown sugar, brulee, and hints of cocoa, sea salt, and sweet tobacco. Sweet but balanced, with bright cherry tartness and a fine, sublime finish that drinks like a top-tier dessert wine.
Synthesized from 35Vivino reviewers' tasting notes for this bottle.
What reviewers say
“That's a super nice Madiera. Nice notes of raisins and figs, candi sugar and tart cherries. I could probably drink more of this than I should”
From a top-rated Vivino review for this bottle.
Summary
From Madeira in Portugal, Rare Wine Co. Thomas Jefferson Madeira (Special Reserve) is a fortified wine.
Only 35 of its Vivino reviewers rate with enough spread for a personal baseline to be measured, so the calibrated figure rests on a thin sample; a broader pool of 35 reviewers with at least two ratings feeds the raw-average track. Its in-cohort standing is measured against 1,421 other fortified wines from Portugal, 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 Rare Wine Co. Thomas Jefferson Madeira (Special Reserve) 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 Fortified · Portugal (1,422 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 35.
Cohort: Fortified · Portugal
