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
74 wines fit
Looking for: sweetness bone dry; fruit exuberant.
Showing the 24 closest of 74.
Argentine Malbec
meets everythingMendoza’s velvet-textured, violet-scented red — soft, generous and the wine that made Malbec international.
- Sweetness: can be low
- Fruit intensity: can be high
Barossa Shiraz
meets everythingDense, chocolatey, high-alcohol Shiraz from some of the oldest producing vines on earth.
- Sweetness: can be low
- Fruit 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.
- Sweetness: can be low
- Fruit intensity: can be high
Napa Valley Cabernet Sauvignon
meets everythingThe New World Cabernet benchmark: ripe cassis and cocoa, plush tannin, generous new oak and high alcohol.
- Sweetness: can be low
- Fruit intensity: can be high
Shiraz
meets everythingThe Australian name for Syrah, used to signal the riper, fuller, sweeter-fruited style the country made famous.
- Sweetness: can be low
- Fruit intensity: can be high
California Pinot Noir
meets everythingRiper and fuller than Burgundy, with dark cherry, cola and baking spice — but retaining real acidity in the coolest sites.
- Sweetness: can be low
- Fruit intensity: can be high
Châteauneuf-du-Pape
meets everythingThe southern Rhône’s flagship: a warm, powerful, herb-scented Grenache-led blend from stony vineyards near Avignon.
- Sweetness: can be low
- Fruit intensity: can be high
New Zealand Pinot Noir
meets everythingDense, fruit-forward and structured — Central Otago and Martinborough produce Pinot with more weight than most cool-climate examples.
- Sweetness: can be low
- Fruit intensity: can be high
Bolgheri
meets everythingCoastal Tuscan Bordeaux blends — the appellation created to give the Super Tuscan idea a legal home.
- Sweetness: can be low
- Fruit intensity: can be high
Dalmatian Plavac Mali
meets everythingPowerful, high-alcohol reds from steep stony sites on the Croatian coast and islands.
- Sweetness: can be low
- Fruit intensity: can be high
McLaren Vale Shiraz
meets everythingMaritime-cooled South Australian Shiraz — a touch fresher and more red-fruited than the Barossa, with a salted-chocolate edge.
- Sweetness: can be low
- Fruit intensity: can be high
Sonoma Cabernet Sauvignon
meets everythingCabernet from Sonoma’s warmer inland valleys — a little softer and more red-fruited than Napa.
- Sweetness: can be low
- Fruit intensity: can be high
Washington Cabernet Sauvignon
meets everythingNew World ripeness with Old World structure — a product of desert heat and extreme diurnal swing east of the Cascades.
- Sweetness: can be low
- Fruit intensity: can be high
Barbera d’Alba
meets everythingBarbera grown in the Langhe alongside Nebbiolo, riper and rounder than the Asti version.
- Sweetness: can be low
- Fruit intensity: can be high
California Rhône blend
meets everythingGrenache, Syrah and Mourvèdre blends from Paso Robles and the Central Coast.
- Sweetness: can be low
- Fruit intensity: can be high
Petite Sirah
meets everythingA Syrah offspring producing inky, tannic wines — and not, despite the name, a smaller version of Syrah.
- Sweetness: can be low
- Fruit intensity: can be high
Plavac Mali
meets everythingDalmatia’s principal red: powerful, high in alcohol, and a child of Zinfandel.
- Sweetness: can be low
- Fruit intensity: can be high
Toro
meets everythingThe most powerful expression of Tempranillo, from a hot, high stretch of the Duero.
- Sweetness: can be low
- Fruit intensity: can be high
Cabernet Sauvignon
The world’s most planted red wine grape: thick-skinned, tannic and blackcurrant-scented, and the backbone of Bordeaux’s left bank.
- Sweetness: can be low
- Fruit intensity: can be high
Malbec
A dark, velvety variety that struggled in its French homeland and became Argentina’s national grape.
- Sweetness: can be low
- Fruit intensity: can be high
Sauvignon Blanc
A pungently aromatic variety whose character swings from flinty and restrained in the Loire to explosively tropical in Marlborough.
- Sweetness: can be low
- Fruit intensity: can be high
Syrah
A peppery, dark-fruited variety that produces two recognisably different wines depending on climate — and two different names to match.
- Sweetness: can be low
- Fruit intensity: can be high
Amarone della Valpolicella
Dried-grape red of enormous concentration: 15–16% alcohol, dried-fruit intensity, and technically dry.
- Sweetness: can be low
- Fruit intensity: can be high
Australian Riesling
Bone dry, intensely limey and steely — a category of its own, with almost nothing in common with German Riesling beyond the grape.
- Sweetness: can be low
- Fruit 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.