Explore by taste

Mendoza’s velvet-textured, violet-scented red — soft, generous and the wine that made Malbec international.

Nebbiolo from a small group of Piedmontese hills: pale in colour, ferocious in tannin, and scented of tar and roses.

Dense, chocolatey, high-alcohol Shiraz from some of the oldest producing vines on earth.

Pure Sangiovese from a warm Tuscan hill town, aged for years before release — Italy’s most powerful expression of the grape.

The world’s most planted red wine grape: thick-skinned, tannic and blackcurrant-scented, and the backbone of Bordeaux’s left bank.

The style that defined "buttery Chardonnay" — ripe stone fruit, vanilla and cream — though the best modern examples are far more restrained.

Unoaked Chardonnay from the coolest corner of Burgundy: citrus, green apple, high acidity and a distinctly saline finish.

The benchmark traditional-method sparkling wine: high acidity, fine bubbles and bready autolytic complexity from long lees ageing.

The most adaptable white grape in the world, and the one most often blamed for what winemakers do to it.

Sangiovese from the historic hills between Florence and Siena: sour cherry, dried herbs and firm acidity, built for the table.

Traditional-method sparkling from the three Champagne grapes on southern English chalk — high acidity, green apple and citrus, with bready lees complexity.

A dark, velvety variety that struggled in its French homeland and became Argentina’s national grape.

Explosively aromatic passionfruit, gooseberry and cut grass — a flavour that had no real precedent when it appeared in the 1980s.

A plush, plum-scented Bordeaux variety that ripens earlier than Cabernet Sauvignon and produces softer, rounder wine.

The New World Cabernet benchmark: ripe cassis and cocoa, plush tannin, generous new oak and high alcohol.

Light, crisp and deliberately neutral — one of the world’s best-selling whites, and a completely different wine from Alsace Pinot Gris.

A pink-skinned mutation of Pinot Noir that makes two utterly different wines depending on whether the label says Gris or Grigio.

A thin-skinned, difficult, site-sensitive variety that produces the most perfumed and transparent red wines in the world.

Fortified sweet wine from the Douro, made by adding grape spirit mid-fermentation — and a family of quite different styles.

Tank-method sparkling wine from Glera: floral, pear-scented and fresh, with none of Champagne’s bready character — by design.

The pale, dry, herb-scented rosé that set the international template for pink wine.

The blended Cabernet–Merlot benchmark: structured, cedary and built to age, with two distinct characters depending on which bank of the river it comes from.

Pinot Noir at its most perfumed and site-specific: pale, silky, high in acid, and the reference point for the variety worldwide.

The most transparent and longest-lived white variety, made from bone dry to intensely sweet and almost never oaked.