Anyone can call a vintage after the fact. The test of a method is whether its calls would have held up. So for any vintage that is already in the past, Foudre does something most forecasts avoid: it checks itself.
What the backtest compares
Foudre takes its own quality-and-risk call for that year and lines it up against what critics and the market actually said — scores and commentary it reads from public web sources, each kept with a link back to where it came from. It then reports whether the two broadly agree, partly agree, or diverge.
When there simply isn't enough sourced evidence to judge, it says so rather than inventing a verdict. "We don't know yet" is a more useful answer than a confident guess.
Why this matters to you
It turns a score into something you can audit. If Foudre's read on the great and the difficult years of the last decade tracks the consensus, its read on the season ahead earns more of your trust. And where it diverges, that disagreement is itself a signal worth a closer look.
One honest caveat: the critic and market figures are extracted from public pages, not a licensed ratings feed, and the report flags them as such. They are there to test the method, not to republish anyone's database.