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
48 wines fit
Looking for: aromatics intensely aromatic.
Showing the 24 closest of 48.
Barolo
meets everythingNebbiolo from a small group of Piedmontese hills: pale in colour, ferocious in tannin, and scented of tar and roses.
- Aromatic intensity: can be high
Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc
meets everythingExplosively aromatic passionfruit, gooseberry and cut grass — a flavour that had no real precedent when it appeared in the 1980s.
- Aromatic intensity: can be high
Sauvignon Blanc
meets everythingA pungently aromatic variety whose character swings from flinty and restrained in the Loire to explosively tropical in Marlborough.
- Aromatic intensity: can be high
Barbaresco
meets everythingBarolo’s neighbour: the same Nebbiolo, a slightly warmer site and a shorter ageing requirement, giving a marginally more approachable wine.
- Aromatic intensity: can be high
Nebbiolo
meets everythingThe grape of Barolo and Barbaresco: pale in colour, ferocious in tannin, and among the most perfumed reds in the world.
- Aromatic intensity: can be high
Sauternes
meets everythingThe benchmark botrytised sweet wine: honey, apricot and saffron, held together by piercing acidity.
- Aromatic intensity: can be high
Tokaji Aszú
meets everythingHungary’s great botrytised sweet wine, from a region classified before Bordeaux — honeyed, smoky and held up by ferocious acidity.
- Aromatic intensity: can be high
Canadian Icewine
meets everythingIntensely sweet wine from grapes picked and pressed while naturally frozen on the vine.
- Aromatic intensity: can be high
Condrieu
meets everythingThe benchmark Viognier: full-bodied, dry and extravagantly scented of apricot and honeysuckle.
- Aromatic intensity: can be high
Gewürztraminer
meets everythingThe most unmistakably aromatic white variety: lychee, rose and ginger, with low acidity and often a touch of sweetness.
- Aromatic intensity: can be high
Moscato d’Asti
meets everythingLightly sparkling, grapey and sweet at around 5.5% alcohol — one of the few genuinely low-alcohol wines that tastes complete.
- Aromatic intensity: can be high
Muscat Blanc à Petits Grains
meets everythingThe finest member of the Muscat family, and one of very few varieties whose wine actually smells of grapes.
- Aromatic intensity: can be high
Torrontés
meets everythingArgentina’s aromatic white: intensely floral on the nose and firmly dry on the palate.
- Aromatic intensity: can be high
Viognier
meets everythingA full-bodied, apricot-and-honeysuckle-scented Rhône variety that nearly disappeared in the 1960s.
- Aromatic intensity: can be high
Amontillado sherry
meets everythingSherry that begins under flor and finishes exposed to air — the bridge between Fino and Oloroso, and dry despite appearances.
- Aromatic intensity: can be high
Asti
meets everythingThe fully sparkling Muscat of Piedmont — sweet, grapey and frothy, and much improved since its Asti Spumante days.
- Aromatic intensity: can be high
Auslese
meets everything"Selected harvest" — individually selected very ripe bunches, often with some botrytis. Usually, though not always, sweet.
- Aromatic intensity: can be high
Austrian botrytis sweet wine
meets everythingBotrytised sweet wines from around the Neusiedlersee — reliable, high in acid, and consistently better value than Sauternes.
- Aromatic intensity: can be high
Beerenauslese
meets everything"Selected berry harvest" — individual botrytised berries picked by hand, producing a concentrated dessert wine.
- Aromatic intensity: can be high
Eiswein
meets everythingGrapes frozen on the vine and pressed while still frozen — pure, piercing fruit with none of botrytis’s honeyed character.
- Aromatic intensity: can be high
Mantinia Moschofilero
meets everythingPale, low-alcohol, intensely floral dry white from a high Peloponnese plateau.
- Aromatic intensity: can be high
Moscatel de Setúbal
meets everythingFortified Muscat macerated on its skins for months — intensely orange-peel-scented and raisiny.
- Aromatic intensity: can be high
Moschofilero
meets everythingA pink-skinned Greek variety producing pale, low-alcohol, intensely floral dry whites.
- Aromatic intensity: can be high
Muscat of Alexandria
meets everythingA coarser but historically vital member of the Muscat family, and parent of many varieties.
- Aromatic intensity: can be high
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.