James Suckling Wine Scraper - Scores & Drink Windows

Scrape jamessuckling.com's tasting-report archive for wine reviews: producer, wine name, vintage, region, appellation, James Suckling 100-point score, drinking window, publish date and note snippet. Extracts public review data from top-100 lists, weekly reports, and en primeur roundups.

Built for wine importers, restaurant beverage directors, wine retailers, sommeliers, wine journalists, fine-wine investors.

What this jamessuckling.com scraper extracts

Every run produces one row per record, with change annotations against your last snapshot, with the following fields:

• report_url (string), Editorial report the wine card was extracted from
• report_title (string)
• rank (integer), Position within the report (1 = top of list)
• full_name (string), Full "Producer + Wine + Region + Vintage" string as displayed
• producer (string), Producer name split from full_name using variety-keyword heuristic
• wine_name (string), Variety + specific bottling (e.g. "Chardonnay Napa Valley Hyde Vineyard")
• vintage (string)
• region (string)
• country (string)
• appellation (string)
• grape_variety (string)
• color (string), Red, White, Rose, Sparkling, Fortified
• suckling_score (integer), 100-point scale
• drinking_window (string), e.g. 2024-2039 — extracted from tasting note text when present
• tasting_note_snippet (string), First 200 chars of the tasting note (full note is subscriber-only)
• tasting_date (string)
• price_at_review (number)
• value_flag (boolean), True when James Suckling flags the wine as a "great value"

Quick start

1. Click Try for free.
2. Leave the input at defaults, or paste the recommended input from lower on this page.
3. Click Start. The default run finishes in under a minute with a small sample.
4. Open the Dataset tab to inspect the shape.
5. Once you like the output, click Schedule and pick a cadence. Daily is typical.

How a run works

1. Scan, walks jamessuckling.com from the seed URL, paginating through list pages.
2. Fetch, visits each detail page and extracts the fields listed above.
3. Diff, compares each record against the snapshot in your named key-value store, labelling it new, changed or unchanged.
4. Persist, the new snapshot is saved for the next run.

What is a delta feed and why does it save money?

A delta feed only pays for what changed since your last run. Instead of re-scraping every record each night, this scraper compares against your stored snapshot and only fully processes rows that added, changed or first appeared. Enable onlyChanged to skip unchanged rows entirely (they are billed at a discounted rate).

What differentiates this scraper?

Direct scraping of Suckling scores + drinking windows is uniquely valuable because Parker + Wine Spectator require paid subscriptions. Vivino covers consumer ratings, not critic scores. James Suckling scores drive premium wine pricing in Asia and US retail; retailers cite them in catalogs (LCBO, Sydney Cellars, Skurnik) daily.

Common use cases

• Weekly refresh of top-scoring wines by region for retailer buying
• Vintage comparison across producers within an appellation
• Drinking-window inventory management for wine cellars
• Suckling score alerts on Bordeaux, Napa, Barolo en primeur releases
• James Suckling top-100 list capture for annual buying guides

How to interpret the fields

What does James Suckling score mean?

On the standard 100-point wine rating scale. 95+ is a benchmark for buying committees. 100 is perfect and extremely rare (maybe 1-2 wines per year). 90-94 is the sweet spot for restaurant lists and retail; 85-89 is the value-tier for daily-drinking wines.

What does Great value flag mean?

James Suckling personally tags a subset of high-scoring wines as "great value" when the price-to-quality ratio is exceptional. Useful for retailers building an under-$30 top-of-list section.

What does Barrel-sample vs bottled scores mean?

En primeur reviews (published before bottling) sometimes score as a range (e.g. 94-96) indicating uncertainty. Post-bottling reviews score as a single number. Retailer buyers weight bottled scores more heavily.

How this compares to alternative scrapers

James Suckling scraper vs Vivino API

Vivino aggregates consumer ratings, not critic scores. Different signal: crowd-taste vs professional-palate. Retailers use Vivino for consumer-facing shelf-talkers and Suckling for buying committee decisions.

James Suckling scraper vs Wine Spectator or Robert Parker

Wine Spectator and Robert Parker require paid subscriptions to access scores in bulk. James Suckling exposes scores in editorial reports for free. This makes JS the only major critic scrapeable at scale without subscriber credentials.

James Suckling scraper vs the WineSearcher price feed

WineSearcher aggregates retail prices, not critic scores. Complementary: run WineSearcher for pricing, this scraper for scores, join on producer + wine name + vintage for a complete competitive-shelf record.

How much does it cost to scrape jamessuckling.com?

Pay-per-event pricing:

• Actor start: $0.00500 per GB of memory, one event per run.
• Wine review: $0.00300 per record delivered to the dataset.
• Wine checked, unchanged: $0.00080 per row when onlyChanged is on and the row was unchanged. Roughly 27% the cost of a full record.

There are no per-request charges and no page-count charges. Costs come only from records you actually receive. A scheduled monitor in delta mode typically costs cents per day; a first-time full crawl is the expensive case that the delta model is designed to avoid on subsequent runs.

Concrete cost examples

Rule-of-thumb cost per run (assumes primary event only, no delta discount):

• 100 records = about $0.30 in records + one actor-start fee
• 500 records = about $1.50
• 1,000 records = about $3.00
• 10,000 records = about $30.00

With delta mode + onlyChanged: true, a daily monitor of 1,000 properties where 5% change costs roughly $0.91 per run (50 full charges + 950 delta-priced skips).

Common questions

Does this scraper need a James Suckling subscription?

No. This scraper extracts public data from editorial tasting reports (top-100 lists, weekly reports, en primeur roundups). Full tasting notes are subscriber-gated but scores, drinking windows, and producer/vintage/region are public.

What is a Suckling score?

James Suckling uses the standard 100-point wine rating scale (originally popularized by Robert Parker). 95+ is exceptional; 90-94 is outstanding; 85-89 is very good; below 85 is skip-worthy for premium buyers. Ranges (e.g. 92-93) indicate barrel samples or en primeur ratings before final blending.

What is a drinking window?

The recommended range of years the wine should be consumed for peak enjoyment. Typically expressed as YYYY-YYYY. Wines drunk before window may lack complexity; wines drunk after may be past-prime. Useful for cellar-management buyers.

How many wine reviews are covered?

Editorial reports cover roughly 30,000-50,000 wine cards per year across 500+ published reports. Historical archive extends back multiple years.

Are en primeur wines included?

Yes. Bordeaux, Rhone, and Burgundy en primeur reports are published annually and picked up on the next scheduled scrape.

What about the full tasting note?

The full note (typically 3-5 sentences) is subscriber-only. This scraper captures a public snippet (first ~200 characters) alongside the score, window, producer, vintage and region.

Does this scraper need an account with jamessuckling.com?

No. The scraper reads only public pages. You do not need credentials.

Why do I need to enable Apify Proxy?

Most sites at scale trigger rate limits or challenges against datacenter IPs. Apify Proxy (residential recommended) handles this. The default input keeps useApifyProxy: true.

Why does the state store need a name?

Delta mode compares each run against the previous snapshot. Apify wipes the default (unnamed) key-value store on every run, which would erase the snapshot. A NAMED store (stateStoreName: "jamessuckling-scraper-state") persists across runs.

Can I run in delta mode without paying for unchanged rows?

Yes. Set onlyChanged: true. Unchanged rows are billed at the discounted record-checked rate; changed rows at the full wine rate. New rows are always full price.

Recommended daily-schedule input

{
  "maxItems": 5,
  "maxReports": 3,
  "proxyConfiguration": {
    "useApifyProxy": true
  }
}

For a full-catalogue first run, raise maxItems to 0 (no cap) and leave onlyChanged: false. For daily monitoring, set onlyChanged: true and keep maxItems at 0.

Turn it into a live alert with Schedules and Webhooks

Combine this scraper with an Apify Schedule and a Webhook to get "new listing in my buy box" alerts without writing code.

1. Configure the input with your buy-box filters (yield floor, price ceiling, markets, etc).
2. Create a Schedule (Actor page, right rail, Schedule) at your cadence. Daily 06:00 UTC is typical.
3. Add a Webhook (Integrations tab on this actor):
   • Event: ACTOR.RUN.SUCCEEDED
   • URL: your Slack / Discord / Zapier / n8n endpoint
   • Payload template: pass resource.defaultDatasetId so the receiver can pull only the delta rows

For Slack, wrap the payload in a text field and push through an incoming webhook. For Zapier or n8n, use the "Webhook by Apify" trigger and map dataset fields to your downstream tool of choice.

Pair this with onlyChanged: true and the actor becomes a pure alert feed. Delta-priced rows keep the bill flat on quiet days.

Related scrapers from this publisher

See other actors under growth-installations for related consumer-intelligence scrapers.

Video walkthrough

Video walkthrough placeholder. Add a YouTube URL to readme.video_url in the yaml to auto-embed once one is published.

Notes and limits

• Keep concurrency modest to stay polite to jamessuckling.com. Default is 5.
• Field schemas can shift when the target site restyles. If a field starts returning null, report it and it will be patched.
• The default input is engineered to complete in under 5 minutes so the platform's daily automated test passes and the actor does not get flagged for maintenance.

Legal

Reads only public editorial tasting reports at /wine-tasting-reports/. Does NOT access the subscriber-only /winegalaxy or the JS-API-KEY-gated custom API. You are responsible for compliance with applicable law and jamessuckling.com's terms of service. If you extract subscriber content via account credentials, you accept the additional obligations of James Suckling's subscriber agreement.