Discovery
Explore by taste
Describe the wine you want rather than naming one. Leave anything you do not care about unset — an unset axis is genuinely unconstrained, not quietly defaulted.
Wine is not two-dimensional. Plotting it on a plane produces a picture that looks explanatory while hiding the fourteen axes the designer discarded to make it fit, and two wines that end up adjacent may have nothing in common. So this sets the dimensions you care about, leaves the rest alone, and tells you for every result which of your requirements it actually meets. See the taste model.
Or just say what you want
Each of these sets the axes below for you, and says what it took you to mean.
White
Sparkling
Start from a common request
Or set it yourself
56 wines fit
Looking for: acidity balanced; tannin barely any; oak a trace.
Showing the 24 closest of 56.
Provence rosé
The pale, dry, herb-scented rosé that set the international template for pink wine.
- Acidity: can be medium
- Tannin: can be low-medium
- Oak influence: can be low-medium
Beaujolais
Light, juicy Gamay, often made by carbonic maceration — the archetypal chillable red.
- Acidity: can be medium
- Tannin: can be low-medium
- Oak influence: can be low-medium
Gamay
Beaujolais’ grape: pale, juicy, low in tannin and high in acid, with a distinctive violet-and-cherry lift.
- Acidity: can be medium
- Tannin: can be low-medium
- Oak influence: can be low-medium
Grenache
A pale, high-alcohol, sweetly fruited Mediterranean variety that anchors Châteauneuf-du-Pape and Priorat.
- Acidity: can be medium
- Tannin: can be low-medium
- Oak influence: can be low-medium
Montepulciano d’Abruzzo
Soft, deeply coloured, plummy Italian red at consistently low prices — and unrelated to the Tuscan town of Montepulciano.
- Acidity: can be medium
- Tannin: can be low-medium
- Oak influence: can be low-medium
Southern Rhône blend
Grenache-led Mediterranean blends — warm, herbal and generous, and among the most reliable value in French wine.
- Acidity: can be medium
- Tannin: can be low-medium
- Oak influence: can be low-medium
Montepulciano
An Adriatic Italian variety producing soft, deeply coloured, affordable reds — and nothing to do with the Tuscan town of the same name.
- Acidity: can be medium
- Tannin: can be low-medium
- Oak influence: can be low-medium
Garnacha rosado
Spain’s fuller, deeper-coloured dry rosé, principally from Navarra and Rioja — more red-fruit weight than Provence.
- Acidity: can be medium
- Tannin: can be low-medium
- Oak influence: can be low-medium
Istrian Malvazija
Istria’s white, made either fresh and floral or amber and tannic after months on skins.
- Acidity: can be medium
- Tannin: can be low-medium
- Oak influence: can be low-medium
Koshu
Japan’s delicate native white: low in alcohol, subtle, and built around restraint.
- Acidity: can be medium
- Tannin: can be low-medium
- Oak influence: can be low-medium
Marsala
Sicily’s fortified wine, made in dry and sweet styles and badly served by its reputation as a cooking ingredient.
- Acidity: can be medium
- Tannin: can be low-medium
- Oak influence: can be low-medium
Moscatel de Setúbal
Fortified Muscat macerated on its skins for months — intensely orange-peel-scented and raisiny.
- Acidity: can be medium
- Tannin: can be low-medium
- Oak influence: can be low-medium
País
Chile’s oldest variety, from century-old dry-farmed bush vines — pale, savoury and the centre of the country’s small-producer revival.
- Acidity: can be medium
- Tannin: can be low-medium
- Oak influence: can be low-medium
Muscat Bailey A
Japan’s most planted red: a 1927 hybrid with a distinctive confected strawberry aroma.
- Acidity: can be medium
- Tannin: can be low-medium
- Oak influence: can be low-medium
Argentine Malbec
Mendoza’s velvet-textured, violet-scented red — soft, generous and the wine that made Malbec international.
- Acidity: can be medium
- Tannin: can be low-medium
- Oak influence: can be low-medium
Merlot
A plush, plum-scented Bordeaux variety that ripens earlier than Cabernet Sauvignon and produces softer, rounder wine.
- Acidity: can be medium
- Tannin: can be low-medium
- Oak influence: can be low-medium
Cabernet Franc
Parent of both Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot, and in its own right a lighter, leafier, more floral red.
- Acidity: can be medium
- Tannin: can be low-medium
- Oak influence: can be low-medium
Cru Beaujolais
Gamay from the ten named granite hills — structured, mineral and ageworthy, and nothing like Beaujolais Nouveau.
- Acidity: can be medium
- Tannin: can be low-medium
- Oak influence: can be low-medium
Primitivo
The Puglian name for the variety Californians call Zinfandel: ripe, high in alcohol, and generous with dark jammy fruit.
- Acidity: can be medium
- Tannin: can be low-medium
- Oak influence: can be low-medium
Zinfandel
The Californian name for the variety known in Puglia as Primitivo — brambly, high in alcohol, and the basis of white Zinfandel.
- Acidity: can be medium
- Tannin: can be low-medium
- Oak influence: can be low-medium
Agiorgitiko
Greece’s most planted red variety: deeply coloured, soft-tannined and generous, from Nemea in the Peloponnese.
- Acidity: can be medium
- Tannin: can be low-medium
- Oak influence: can be low-medium
Alentejo red
Soft, ripe, approachable reds from hot southern Portugal — reliable and consistently good value.
- Acidity: can be medium
- Tannin: can be low-medium
- Oak influence: can be low-medium
Australian Grenache
Old bush-vine Grenache from McLaren Vale and the Barossa — perfumed, medium-bodied and transformed from its jammy past.
- Acidity: can be medium
- Tannin: can be low-medium
- Oak influence: can be low-medium
Australian Pinot Noir
Cool-climate Pinot from the Yarra Valley, Mornington Peninsula and Tasmania — savoury, structured and increasingly serious.
- Acidity: can be medium
- Tannin: can be low-medium
- Oak influence: can be low-medium
What the results mean
A wine matches an axis when its recorded range covers the level you asked for, not when its midpoint happens to land there. Asking for a medium-bodied red returns every red capable of being medium-bodied, which is the honest answer: a category genuinely spans a range, and pretending otherwise would hide most of what you could actually buy.
Where a wine misses one of your requirements it is still shown if it is close, with the miss marked. A near-match presented openly is more useful than a shorter list that quietly drops it — or, worse, one that includes it and says nothing.