After “What’s your favorite wine?” the next most commonly asked questions I receive center around tasting wine: “How do you do it?” being the most popular. I suppose with all of the recent furor on the blogs over the disclosure that reviewers for Robert M. Parker’s The Wine Advocate rarely taste blind, this level of interest is understandable.

Although we regularly publish a box that covers “About the Buying Guide,” provide submitters with an FAQ and have done a video interview with The Wall Street Journal that covers the most salient points, questions still persist. So, in the spirit of full disclosure, here’s “How we do it.”

Virtually all wines (99+%) reviewed at our Mount Kisco offices are tasted blind, meaning the identities of the producers are hidden. Because our reviewers cover specific beats and taste for specific deadlines, they generally know the country from which the wines come, and sometimes the grape varieties, but that’s it.

Wines are tasted in flights of five wines, grouped as closely as possible according to grape variety/region and vintage. The glasses used are always the same type, the temperatures of the wines are closely controlled and tasters are free to take as much time as they require. Notes are taken and scores recorded prior to the wines being revealed. After the wines are known, the ratings and reviews are entered into our database. This allows our contributors to make mention of salient facts or impressions about the producers in their text, giving greater depth to the reviews.

Generally, wines are reviewed by a single person responsible for a given region, but on some occasions wines are reviewed by several individuals, as seen in the WSJ video. We sometimes invite qualified outside tasters to participate in these sessions. This allows our tasters to compare their impressions and debate the quality levels of certain wines, helping to keep our panelists open-minded and fresh. On rare occasions, we request additional samples and retaste wines that have already been rated to confirm our initial impressions.

The tiny fraction of wines we review in our Mount Kisco offices under nonblind conditions are tasted in the presence of importers or producers who have been invited to present their wines. Such tastings are clearly indicated in the printed magazine, where they appear against a shaded background.

Outside of our offices, we do sometimes review wines in situ during visits to wine-producing regions and cellars, where it would it would be impossible or impractical to taste blind. When practical, we reconfirm those impressions by following up with blind tastings at our offices.

Once wines have been reviewed, they’re scheduled for publication—generally about two months later. So wines that have been reviewed prior to July 2 are eligible for inclusion in the October issue of the magazine (available in early September). This lead time allows time for our editorial team to make any necessary edits to the reviews—not the scores—and for our sales team to convince wineries and importers to support their products through advertising.

Finally, now that the number of reviews has grown to average about 1,000 per issue, we often have to make the tough decisions about which reviews will appear in the printed magazine (the others appear only in our online Buying Guide). In some cases, we elect to feature only the highest scoring wines, while in others we feature entire regions or wine types exclusively online.

If you have any more questions about our tasting and review process, please feel free to post them in the comments field and I’ll try to respond in a timely manner.