Backstage at The Morning Claret

How I put together the wine guides and what makes them unique

Next week will see the publication of TMC’s third wine guide this year. The topic is the orange wines of Goriška Brda, Slovenia. I launched these guides at the beginning of 2025. My subscribers (that’s you) made this possible, as there are enough of you (just shy of 4,000 spread across 82 countries) to make it both financially feasible and worthwhile in terms of potential audience.

In an age where content lifespan is measured in hours and attention spans in single seconds, in-depth guides like this might seem a bit old-school. But they’re amongst the most read articles on my site, so it seems you enjoy them. Do let me know in the comments, or my subscriber chat, if you have any feedback or suggestions.

These guides are (as far as I know) unique in terms of their themes, their completeness and their focus purely on low-intervention and natural wines. Plus, they don’t push the fiction of scores. Find out why not here.

Instead, you get the combined opinions of our tasters, stylistic notes on each wine, plus our favourites - both overall and personal. I think it’s a great way to discover wines you might like. My personal tastes and opinions are pretty clear, but yours may differ. I aim to offer guidance without being judgemental.

Making of…

Here’s a behind-the-scenes glance into how I put the guides together. This is partly a shameless plug to convince you to become a paying subscriber - after you realise how much work goes into producing this content.

Step 1 - Concept and producer research

After I create the concept for a new guide, the first step is to assemble a list of potential growers who should be included. For the Collio orange wine guide, this was easy enough because the number of qualifying winemakers is limited. Still, I thought I’d rounded up everyone, and it turns out I missed a couple - apologies to Renato Keber, whose Ribolla Extreme was omitted.

The Bordeaux low-intervention red wine guide was a different matter. I’m sure there are 50-100 growers who would qualify. There’s no way I could find or taste them all in a sensible timespan, so this guide was lead by Amsterdam-based importers who could more easily supply me with samples. I reached out to a select handful of additional growers just to round it out.

For the Brda orange guide, there are around 30 growers in the region who make at least one orange wine. I wanted to limit the numbers a bit so kept the rules strict. Only growers practising and/or certified organic, and only wines that fulfil my basic criteria for natural wine (spontaneous fermentation, unfiltered, unfined, minimal added sulphites etc). That reduced the list to 20.

Step 2 - Contact producers and source wines

Next I contact the winemakers, by whatever means necessary to get a response: email, Instagram DMs, WhatsApp, carrier pigeon. Everyone is asked if they want to participate. The conditions are simple: I request one bottle of each wine that a producer wishes to submit. No fee, no pay-to-play, the producer just has to ship the bottles to me in Amsterdam.

The forthcoming Brda guide has a nice twist: I’m actually in the region at the moment, so I decided to visit everyone who agreed to participate and pick up bottles in person. It was a good excuse to reconnect with old friends, to visit a few new faces and to refresh my background knowledge of the region and the growers.

18 growers responded in Brda, and I spent four days getting round them all. Some visits were brief, just saying hi and picking up bottles, others included more lengthy tastings, vineyard or cellar tours.

Step 3 - Catalogue wines and create flight plan

After all bottles have been acquired, I create a spreadsheet with all wines (so far it’s between 40 - 52 per guide) and enough technical information to allow me to make a sensible flight plan.

The flight plan is a way of structuring the tasting into groups of 5-8 wines, split by varietal, maturity or whatever categorisation makes sense. It helps make the tasting manageable and avoids tasters being overwhelmed.

For Bordeaux, wines were grouped by sub-region/village and/or whether they were younger or older vintages. The Brda orange wine tasting (which took place yesterday) was grouped by varietal and in some cases by maturity level. There were eight flights with 52 wines in total.

Step 4 - Recruit tasters

I taste blind with two colleagues. For Brda, we increased this to three. I recruit interested wine professionals who have a spare morning and the will to spend it tasting. The aim is to have a range of opinions and personal preferences around the table.

In Amsterdam, Morning Claret HQ is well supplied with glassware, spittoons and blind tasting sleeves to ensure a high quality tasting experience. Here in Slovenia, where I’m renting a holiday home, it was a little more challenging. Thanks to a very generous local bar owner and my sommelier colleagues, we pooled together all the necessary equipment.

Step 5 - Bottle shots

A slick tasting guide requires good photos. I’m no David Bailey but I try to make the bottles look as appealing as possible. With some lighting and a Sony DSLR, the last two guides were not too shabby.

Here in Slovenia, I made do with an appropriately coloured wall, a wooden table on the terrace and my trusty Pixel 8 Pro.

Step 6 - Tasting day

My day starts at least two hours before the tasters arrive. The day before, I will have chilled all the wines to the correct temperature - somewhere between 12-16C. I don’t want whites (or especially oranges) too cold, but also reds shouldn’t be too warm.

In the morning, I open all the bottles (52 of them yesterday, which took some time), making a brief check for cork issues (and praying I have a second bottle in that case), and organise them into flights. The wines need to be blind for me too, so I cover the bottles and then ask a colleague to randomly number them with stickers.

The tasting takes around three hours. We taste silently, pausing between each flight for some discussion and unveiling of bottles. There are always surprises. Wines I know and love sometimes misbehave, outliers I thought were dubious rise to the top.

Blind tasting is essential to level the playing field. No preconceptions when you see a favourite label. Similarly, it’s important to taste all the wines on one occasion, everything under identical conditions. No favouritism.

Step 7 - Number crunching

After I’ve got everyone’s notes and scores, I perform some Excel wizardry to arrive at an average score for each wine. Then I can see which wines were firm favourites with everyone. This is used to generate a top 10 list - no ranking, all ten are presented as equals.

Step 8 - Writing, writing, writing

Now the writing up process begins. I combine notes from all tasters to give an overall impression of each wine. The introduction, details of the selection process for the wines and sections for individual and overall favourites are written. A paragraph about each taster, together with their quote, completes the picture.

This step takes about one full day for each of the two parts of the guide. It’s time consuming compiling information and tasting notes for 50 wines, adding in the photos and tracking down pricing and availability information. But if you can’t buy the wines somewhere, it’s not a very useful guide is it?

Step 9 - Publish and be damned

Finally! After a few weeks of hard work, I press the button and hope someone reads it.