Styles
Wine styles
231 named wine styles, organised under 21 consumer-facing archetypes. A grape is a plant; a style is a finished wine — and that distinction is the whole point.
Chablis, oaked Californian Chardonnay and Blanc de Blancs Champagne are all 100% Chardonnay, and they taste nothing like one another. Collapsing them into a single “what Chardonnay tastes like” makes it impossible to answer the questions people actually have. So the grape pages describe the envelope, and these pages describe specific wines.
Start with a shape
If you know roughly what you want but not what it is called, start here.
17 wines
Light-bodied dry red
Pale, low-tannin reds with bright acidity and red-fruit character — the reds that suit a light chill and don’t overwhelm food.
36 wines
Medium-bodied dry red
The middle of the red-wine spectrum: enough structure for food, not so much that it dominates. The most versatile red category.
48 wines
Full-bodied dry red
Dense, powerful reds with substantial tannin, dark fruit and often noticeable oak — the wines for steak and for cellaring.
35 wines
Crisp dry white
High-acid, unoaked whites built for refreshment and for seafood — citrus and mineral rather than fruit-forward.
17 wines
Aromatic dry white
Dry whites with pronounced perfume — herbaceous, floral or tropical — that you notice before you taste them.
17 wines
Rich, oaked white
Full-bodied dry whites with barrel and lees influence — vanilla, toast, hazelnut and a creamy texture.
6 wines
Off-dry white
Whites with a clear touch of sweetness balanced by acidity — the most useful category for spicy food.
0 wines
Sweet white
Unambiguously sweet wines, concentrated by noble rot, freezing, drying or arrested fermentation.
4 wines
Dry rosé
Pink wines made from black grapes with brief skin contact — dry, fresh and far more food-friendly than their reputation.
13 wines
Traditional-method sparkling
Sparkling wine with its second fermentation in the bottle, aged on the lees — the method behind Champagne, Cava, Crémant, Franciacorta and English sparkling.
5 wines
Tank-method sparkling
Sparkling wine with its second fermentation in a pressurised tank — fresher, fruitier and less bready than the traditional method.
2 wines
Sparkling rosé
Pink sparkling wine, made either by brief skin contact or — uniquely in Champagne — by blending red wine in.
0 wines
Pét-nat (ancestral method)
Sparkling wine bottled before its first fermentation finishes, so the bubble comes from the original ferment rather than a second one.
1 wines
Orange (skin-contact) wine
White grapes fermented on their skins, producing amber-coloured wine with tannin and savoury character.
5 wines
Dry fortified wine
Wines fortified after fermentation completes, leaving them dry — principally the sherry family.
11 wines
Sweet fortified wine
Wines where spirit is added mid-fermentation, killing the yeast and leaving natural sweetness — Port, Madeira, Banyuls and their relatives.
7 wines
Botrytised sweet wine
Wines made from grapes affected by noble rot, which concentrates sugar and adds its own honey-and-saffron character.
3 wines
Dried-grape (passito) wine
Wines made from grapes dried after picking, concentrating them without rot or frost — including both sweet passito and dry Amarone.
2 wines
Ice wine
Wine pressed from grapes frozen on the vine, where the ice is discarded and only concentrated juice is fermented.
2 wines
Late-harvest sweet wine
Wines from grapes left on the vine to over-ripen and shrivel, concentrating sugar without rot or frost.
0 wines
Low and no-alcohol wine
Wine with alcohol removed after fermentation, or made deliberately light — a fast-growing adjacent category with its own technical constraints.