How we work

We help people work out what they like and find wine they will enjoy drinking, without requiring a specialist vocabulary first. You should be able to arrive knowing only that you liked something last week, and leave with a clearer sense of why.

Two things sit at the centre of the publication: a plain-language description of your own taste, and editorial writing about grapes, places and the ideas behind what is in the glass.

The Taste Profile asks five questions and describes a direction in plain language — the kind of wine that is likely to suit you, and why.

A Taste Profile is a complete and useful answer in its own right. It is not automatically an exact-bottle recommendation. Knowing the direction that fits you and naming a specific bottle we stand behind are two different claims, and we keep them separate.

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Everything we publish about wine sits in one of three states. They are deliberately not interchangeable.

Research Profile

Built from credible published, professional and technical evidence about a grape, a place or a style. It explains how something typically behaves. It is not a claim that we have tasted any particular bottle.

Feeling Vine Tasted

The exact release has been tasted by Feeling Vine under our controlled process. This records that the tasting happened — nothing more. Tasted does not mean recommended, and some tasted wines will never be recommended.

Feeling Vine Recommended

Direct tasting of the exact release, plus editorial approval, plus the remaining eligibility requirements. Only a wine that clears all of it is described as recommended.

Most wine recommendations exist because a slot needed filling. Ours do not. If nothing meets the standard, we would rather give you a shorter answer — or no bottle at all — than pad the page with something we do not believe in.

So a page here may show fewer bottles than you expected, or none yet. That is the system working, not a fault.

Judgement about a specific bottle ultimately depends on us tasting that exact release. Wine changes between vintages, bottlings and markets, and a well-researched profile of a grape or a region cannot stand in for that.

Tastings follow a consistent internal process so that our own notes remain comparable over time. We do not publish the operational detail of that process.

Price is context and constraint, not a measure of quality. An expensive bottle is not automatically better, and a cheap one is not automatically good value; both are judged against what they are trying to be.

Commercial relationships and retailer economics do not decide what we recommend or how we judge value. Where a wine can be bought is a separate question from whether it is any good, and we keep those systems apart.

We use AI-assisted research and editorial tools in the course of our work, in the same spirit as any other reference tool: to gather, organise and check.

What such tools cannot do is stand in for judgement. They cannot invent a tasting, decide how an exact release performs, establish a current price or availability, or approve a recommendation. Those remain human editorial acts.