Red · California · United States
The Prisoner Red Blend
Scored from 28,878 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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Tasting profile
A bold, complex red blend with aromas of black currant, cherry, cola, raisin, and dark chocolate, leading to a palate of cherry, fig, plum, and caramel touched by spice and oak. Medium-bodied, well-balanced, and remarkably smooth, it finishes soft and memorable rather than overtly fruity.
Synthesized from 28,878Vivino reviewers' tasting notes for this bottle.
What reviewers say
“This wine has to be one of the best wines I've tasted in a long time. The complexity of flavors along with its smooth finish made every sip a true delight.”
From a top-rated Vivino review for this bottle.
Summary
The Prisoner was created and inspired by the drinkable “mixed blacks” first made by the Italian immigrants who originally settled in the Napa Valley. In 2003 The Prisoner was launched and soon became the most recognized innovative and unique Napa Valley Red Wine blend, leading the resurgence of blends by incorporating Zinfandel with the unlikely “mix” of Cabernet Sauvignon, Syrah, Petite Sirah, and Charbono. Bold aromas of black cherry and plum are heightened by hints of oak and Madagascar vanilla. A soft and velvety palate of anise, dark cocoa powder and roasted sage lead into a dense finish with luscious tannins.
From California in the United States, The Prisoner Red Blend is a red. It blends Cabernet Sauvignon, Petite Sirah, Charbono and Shiraz Syrah. The cheapest 750 ml listing found for it is $38.99, which puts the bottle in the $30–60 band.
1,155 other reds from the United States form the cohort it is ranked inside. 28,878 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 30,345 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 The Prisoner Red Blend 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 28,878.
