Every grower and every buyer asks the same questions each year. Was the season kind or cruel? Will this vintage age, or should it be drunk young? Is the price the market is asking fair for the quality in the bottle? The evidence to answer them exists — in weather records, in the lie of the land, in what critics and the trade are already saying — but it is scattered, and reading all of it for every estate, every year, is more than any one person has time for.
Foudre is built to do exactly that reading. Think of it less as a robot critic and more as a diligent analyst who never sleeps: it gathers the season's evidence, weighs it against decades of history, and hands you a clear, sourced read on quality and risk.
A coordinator and its specialists
Under the hood, the work is split between a coordinator and a handful of specialists, each responsible for one kind of evidence. One specialist reads the climate. One maps the terroir. One scans the public web for what the trade and critics are saying. The coordinator decides which to call, then a final step weighs everything together against a structured model of what makes a great vintage.
Splitting the work this way matters to you for one reason: every conclusion can be traced back to its evidence. When Foudre flags a frost risk or a dilution worry, you can see which signal drove it.
What it produces
For a given estate and vintage you get a quality-and-risk score, the handful of drivers behind it, a plain-language summary written for your role, and a downloadable report. When the vintage is already in the past, you also get a backtest — a comparison of Foudre's call against the scores critics and the market actually gave, with links to the sources.
What it is not
It is not a buy-or-sell signal, and it is not investment advice — it is decision support you bring your own judgement to. It is not a critic-score database; it reads public scores only to check its own work. And it is not a live weather service: its climate inputs are settled reanalysis and seasonal-forecast datasets, not this morning's forecast.