Let Flavor be Your Guide!

Just 8 flavor characteristics can help you find the right wine for you every time.

After years of testing and collaboration with sensory scientists, winemakers, globally recognized wine educators and winery tasting room visitors and staff, we found that eight flavor attributes that best cover the preferences of most wine drinkers.

If you can tell us how much of each you want to experience, we can match you with the right wines for you using our flavor filter tool.

Sweetness

Wines can be super sweet or bone dry… And all levels of sweetness have their place in a wine glass! Unlike most tasting notes or tech sheets you’ll find our data is not based on how much residual sugar is in the wine. Instead, we focus here on the perception of sweetness… How sweet does it taste?

Spice

Spice can be a funky word, as here we use it to describe peppery and baking spices like nutmeg or cinnamon. (Yep, I already hear wine scholars saying that baking spice most often comes from oak influence. For this, baking spice goes alongside peppery spices to keep things simple and easier for everyone.)

Intensity

Do you prefer a wine to be subtle in its flavor, or do you want it to take center stage? The intensity of wine can be determined by several things, from body and mouthfeel to absolute flavor. Think of both as you decide how intense an experience you want your wine to give you.

Floral

Sometimes a wine may have an aroma of jasmine, honeysuckle, lavender, or other flowers. I doubt you’ve eaten those flowers, but think of what they smell like… How much of that influence would you like in your wine?

Fruit

Depending on the wine, you may encounter fruit flavors resembling green apples, lemons, tangerines, tart cherries, blackberries, honeydew melon, and lots more. In the wines profiled here, none of those flavors have been added, they are just ways wines made from grapes can express themselves. How fruity of a wine are you looking to enjoy?

Acidity

Think of squeezing a lemon. Is your mouth watering a bit? Often, it is the perception of acid that inspires that feeling. Winemaking and other flavor attributes can counteract the perception of a wine’s true acidity, so rather than reporting acidity levels in wine, here (just like in sweetness) we are talking about perceived acidity.

Oak

Oak can add texture and flavor to a wine. Here, we are thinking about flavor, and for these purposes, we are primarily thinking of flavors like oak, vanilla, and caramel.

Minerality

Minerality can be tricky, as it is a highly disputed attribute in the wine world. We are referring to an aroma and flavor that might remind you of how a rock might smell– or that smell on the sidewalk just after it rains. Salinity or saltiness also falls here in minerality. And you know that tasting note you might have read of pencil lead? Yep– that one goes here, too. (But please, don’t eat any pencils… or rocks, for that matter, either!!)

Try the Flavor Filter!

Put these flavor attributes to the test and find wines that you’ll love!