Cookies - General
You must have cookies enabled in order to access WineSpectator.com. In order for users to take advantage of the features on our site, WineSpectator.com requires that your web browser be able to both accept cookies from our server and handle secure pages.
If you are having a problem registering, performing a search, or signing in, you may be having a "cookie problem," and the system is not recognizing you (and your computer) as a current member or a valid registration due to one of the following reasons:
(1)You have a corrupted cookie, your computer is not accepting cookies,
(2) your computer cannot handle a secure connection or there is a firewall blocking you from properly accessing our site.
NOTE: Some old browsers may not be able to accommodate cookies, and if you're behind a firewall, you may not be able to reach secure pages.
Please review the following troubleshooting list and follow the directions to make sure that your browser is configured to properly view WineSpectator.com:
(1) Try our Cookie Test page to find out if your browser is configured to accept cookies;
(2) If any of the items in the cookie test (#1, above) came back as 'Failed', use the links below to enable cookies for your browser.
(3) Try our Cookie Clearer page to clear any corrupted cookies on your computer that may be preventing you from accessing our website.
(4) If you are on Internet Explorer, and Windows, try adding www.winespectator.com as a Trusted Site. (See instructions on how to do this.)
If the problem persists, please use the links below to figure out how to modify cookie settings for your browser.
Internet Explorer
Firefox
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NetscapeThe best option for you is to do a trace route from your computer to our servers. It is possible that your machine is encountering some slow routers on its way to our servers. To do this, please follow these instructions:
(1) Get a DOS window by going to Start ~~> Run ~~> type cmd and hit enter.
(2) Type tracert www.WineSpectator.com and hit enter.
(3) Please send us the results at wsonline@mshanken.com.
Slow websites can also be attributed to a browser-specific problem, which may be fixed with an upgrade. Also, please visit www.cigaraficionado.com and check to see if you are experiencing the same issues there.If you are having trouble logging in through your blackberry, please enable the javascript in your settings. For additional information and support, please refer to the Blackberry support page: Blackberry support page
There is a known issue in that some Safari browsers, on some OSX versions, crash because of an Apple incompatibility with the Flash Player. If you switch to Firefox for your browser, you'll eliminate the crashing problem.
If you are having trouble viewing videos, here are some factors to consider:
(a) Internet connection - Streaming videos work best on faster connections. If you're on a slower connection, try viewing our downloadable mp4 videos
(b) Browser and internet connection - Our videos work best on Internet Explorer and Firefox. There are known incompatibilities between Apple OSX 10.3.9 and 10.4.5 and Internet Explorer. You can download Mozilla Firefox at Mozilla.com
(c) Virus Software - You may need to adjust your preference settings to allow our videos to play by adding the site as a trusted source.
(d) Flash - It is best to use the latest version of Flash to view our videos. To download the latest version of Flash, you can get it at Adobe.Although we do not have a wireless application protocol (WAP) version of our website that readily supports mobile devices, some mobile settings can allow you to view our site. Unfortunately, software updates for your mobile device may change your viewing capability for WineSpectator.com, preventing you from logging in. Please contact our service department for assistance (800) 866-0775, ext. 353.
The information we collect is used to improve the content of our website, used to notify consumers about updates to our website and used by us to contact consumers for marketing purposes. We do not share the information with other organizations for any purpose. For more details, visit the Privacy Policy section of our site under "Help" on the navigation bar.
You can contact us by phone (800) 866-0775, ext. 353, or via e-mail: wsonline@mshanken.com. Our technical service department is available during normal business hours, Monday to Friday, 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. EST, excluding holidays and weekends. All inquiries will be addressed within two business days.
For information on print and online advertising, please visit the Advertise With Us section, which can also be found at the bottom right of the www.WineSpectator.com homepage, under "Related Links," or under "For the Trade" on the navigation bar.
Yes. Wine Spectator School offers an extensive list of online courses, suitable for novices, more experienced wine lovers and professionals in wine sales and service. Please visit www.WineSpectatorSchool.com for the full catalog. If you are looking for tasting classes in your area, visit the "Marketplace" section of WineSpectator.com and then click on "Wine Courses" to search through the directory for local courses.
Our Wine Shop Search allows you to search through our database of nearly 2,500 fine-wine retailers for one in your area. You can also find it by visiting the "Shop" section on the navigation bar.
We currently offer several free e-mail newsletters, including Sips & Tips, Wine & Healthy Living, Collecting & Auctions and Video Theater. To sign up for any of them, please visit the newsletters page.Our Insider and Advance newsletters are sent only to WineSpectator.com subscribers.
To purchase back issues of Wine Spectator, please visit the Purchase Back Issues page in our website's Marketplace section. You can also find the "Order a back issue" link on our site's In the Current Issue page or on every table of contents page for archived issues.
Please visit www.WineSpectator.com and click on "Marketplace" on the navigation bar and then click on "Calendar of Events" and then click on ""To add an event to our calendar, click here." Or, you can submit an event here.
If you are interested in purchasing reprints of articles, please contact the reprint department at reprints@mshanken.com. (Minimum 500 copies.)
You can link to our site through the RSS feeds, but you cannot reproduce our content for usage on your website without prior express written consent.
You are welcome to link to any page on WineSpectator.com, although some are accessible only to subscribers. However, reproduction or reprinting of any content is prohibited without prior express written consent.
We do not sell, rent or exchange our mailing lists.
We do not store any credit card information whatsoever within any cookies on our website. The only information that is stored on our cookie is information used to log in, such as name and username. Wine Spectator does not store financial information on cookies.
Click on the "Customer Care" link located in the upper left corner of the www.WineSpectator.com homepage, or under the "Help" section of the navigation bar. Once you've been directed to the next page, please locate your account using either your e-mail address and zip code, your account number or your mailing address. Once your account is located, please click on the Wine Spectator links and you will find the option to change your password (or update your e-mail address) in the left section of the page.
First search for the desired wines using any of our Wine Ratings Search tools (Basic Search, Advanced Search or Browse). From the results page, you can select the wines you want to save by checking the "Select" box in the right-hand column, then click the button at the bottom of the page that reads "Add checked wines to your Personal Wine List." Alternately, from the search results page, you may click on a wine name to see more detailed information about that wine; from that page, you can click on the "Add this wine to my Personal Wine List" link at the top.
If you are receiving duplicate subscriptions, please contact wsonline@mshanken.com with your full name, mailing address and account number and an e-mail address where you can be reached, and we can correct that for you.
Wine Spectator Advance and Wine Spectator Insider are available to paid subscribers. If you are a subscriber and are having difficulty viewing these newsletters, you may have a version of Adobe Acrobat Reader that is too old or may be corrupt. Our issues are viewed best with Adobe Acrobat Reader 4.0 or higher. You will need to upgrade to a newer version (4.0 or higher) or uninstall the current version and reinstall the program. To get the latest edition of Acrobat, visit Adobe's download page.
This means that you are not allowing persistent cookies. Persistent cookies are cookies that remain on the computer even after you close your browser. To allow cookies for WineSpectator.com, please check your Internet settings to allow cookies. Please click on the link for more information on cookies: Cookie Information Please click on the following link for our cookie test.
Print and online subscriptions are separate products. However, if you are a current print subscriber, you can receive your first annual online subscription at a discounted rate. The cost to magazine subscribers is $25 instead of the regular price of $49.95. With an online subscription, you will gain access to more than 177,000 wine ratings, early access to selected ratings and major barrel-tasting reports, the Insider and Advance newsletters, our database of the latest auction prices for collectible wines, blogs from our senior editors, extensive travel and dining content and other services that are not available in the magazine.
If you only want to subscribe to the magazine, visit the Subscribe Now section, which can also be reached from the bottom of our homepage in the section labeled Wine Spectator Magazine. Fill in your information and click on "Submit" once the form has been completed. However, we offer great savings on joint subscriptions to the website and magazine.
For more details, visit the Subscribe section of our site, which can be found under "Help" in the navigation bar. You can also access the online subscription section from the www.WineSpectator.com homepage, from the "Become a Member" link in the upper left corner. Select the subscription option you want and enter your information and click submit.Please visit the Wine Spectator Gift Center, which can also be found at the bottom of our homepage via the WS Gift center link or under "Marketplace" on our navigation bar, under Wine Gift Ideas. To give a subscription to Wine Spectator magazine as a gift, click on "Give a WINE SPECTATOR Magazine Gift Subscription." We recently began offering gift subscriptions to WineSpectator.com; for those, click on "Give a Membership to WineSpectator.com."
Visit the Subscribe section of our site, which can be found under "Help" in the navigation bar. You can also access the subscription section from the www.WineSpectator.com homepage, from the "Become a Member" link in the upper left corner. Select the subscription option you want and enter your information and click submit.
All WineSpectator.com subscribers are by default enrolled in the auto-renewal program in which we automatically continue your service without interruption as long as the credit card number you provided is still current. You can turn off the auto-renewal feature from your account at any time by contacting wsonline@mshanken.com.
A Fuzzy Search simply tells our search engine to look at the terms you typed into the search box and find exact matches, as well as matches to items with similar spellings. This will expand your search to include more matches, and is helpful in cases where you do not know the exact spelling of the winery or wine for which you are searching. In the event you perform a wine ratings search that returns zero results, the database will automatically try that search again using Fuzzy Search.
A wine described, as "Drink Now" is one that we believe will not improve with further aging. It may stay at its current quality for some time—six months to a year, or even longer—but we do not expect it to ever be better than it is now.
The price information included in our Wine Ratings Search database and many of our articles shows the prices of wines at the time they were released for sale, not their current prices. However, we do track many wines that are commonly sold at auction, and for those collectibles, you can find the current auction price. That appears in the Auction Price Database or can be found through the Wine Ratings Search by clicking on the name of a wine from the search results page. This will give you a page with even more detailed information, including the Auction Price and, under the Auction Data tab below the tasting note, a summary of recent auction price history.
Auction prices reported by the magazine and the website always include the buyer's premium.
Entries for our Restaurant Awards program are accepted only in the first month of each year. For exact dates, entry guidelines and entry forms, please visit theRestaurant Awards Program page. (You can also find the information on how to enter the awards on www.WineSpectator.com under "For the Trade" on the navigation bar.)
Our Wine Spectator Advance newsletter provides online subscribers and retailers a look at selected ratings from the upcoming issue of the magazine; we have timed the posting and e-mailing notification for the Advance so that our consumer customers should be receiving it at the same time as retailers.Our online subscribers also receive advance notice of ratings from other sources, including the Wine Spectator Insider biweekly newsletter, the Tasting Highlights—selections of notable wines from our editors' latest tastings — that are featured on our homepage between one and three times a week, and the New Wines, New Faces reports on noteworthy new vintners or wineries.
Of course, many retailers and distributors are also subscribers to our website and may obtain access to these ratings in the same way our consumer customers do. To ensure you receive the timeliest information, please make sure you are signed up to receive e-mail alerts on when the latest issues of the Insider and Advance are posted and check the homepage of our website regularly for the latest updates.Please visit the free About Our Tastings page to learn more about how Wine Spectator editors taste and score wines.
All magazine articles are posted online, for subscribers only, after the issue is mailed to subscribers and can be found in the Magazine Archives area of the Articles section of our website. However, the archived articles do not include photographs and illustrations. All ratings from the magazine Buying Guide are added to our online Wine Ratings Search database, after the issue reaches newsstands.
Online subscribers get sneak peaks at some ratings before the notes appear in the magazine, in our Tasting Highlights and in our biweekly Insider newsletter. Those ratings do not immediately appear in our online database, but they are added to the wine ratings database on a rolling schedule, each time we update the database with the tasting notes from the latest issue or more often if necessary.
Common Technical Problems
- What should I do when I receive the "Subscribe Now" error message?
- What should I do if the website is running slow?
- Why can't I log in using my Blackberry?
- Why does the website or video crash each time I'm trying to access it via Safari?
- Why am I having trouble viewing the videos?
- Why am I no longer able to log onto the website from my mobile device when I could previously?
General Information
- What is the privacy policy for Wine Spectator Online?
- How can I contact customer service for technical assistance?
- How do I advertise on Wine Spectator?
- Does Wine Spectator offer educational classes?
- How do I find a Wine Retailer in my area?
- How do I sign up for your newsletters?
- How can I purchase back issues of your magazine?
- How can I submit an event online?
- Who do I contact if I want to purchase reprints?
- Can we incorporate your RSS Feeds directly into our website?
- Is it possible for us to link to your website?
- Do we sell and/or rent our subscriber mailing list?
- Is my credit card information stored within any cookies on the website?
Manage Your Account
- How can I change my password? How can I change my e-mail address?
- How can I add wines to the Personal Wine List?
- I am receiving duplicate subscriptions, how can I correct this?
- Why can't I view the Wine Spectator Advance and/or the Wine Spectator Insider newsletter? Why am I getting a blank screen while trying to open the newsletter(s)?
- Why do I have to log in each time I come back to Wine Spectator Online?
- Why can’t I access the website if I’m just a print subscriber? Why do I have to pay an additional charge to access online content?
Subscription Services
- How do I subscribe to Wine Spectator Print Magazine?
- How do I give Wine Spectator Magazine as a gift subscription?
- How do I subscribe to Wine Spectator Online?
- How do I renew my online subscription?
Website Content
- What is a Fuzzy Search?
- What does it mean when a wine is rated and it specifically says "Drink Now"?
- Does the price information online reflect prices of wines on release or the current price?
- Do the auction prices reported include the buyers' premium?
- Where can we get more information on submitting our wine list for an Award of Excellence?
- Do distributors and retailers get advance notice of wine ratings before magazine and online subscribers?
- How are the wines tasted?
- Are all the magazine articles and/or ratings from the magazine available online?
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