How recommendations work.

Find a Bottle starts with a few questions about what you want to drink: colour, style, occasion, budget and how adventurous you want to be. If you are choosing a gift, there is one additional question about who it is for.

Your answers create a brief. The recommendation engine then compares that brief with the bottles currently eligible to appear and returns up to three that fit best.

It is not a quiz designed to give everyone an answer. Sometimes the most accurate result is one bottle. Sometimes it is none.

Find a Bottle

A bottle has to clear several checks before Find a Bottle can consider it.

Feeling Vine works at release level rather than treating every wine with the same name as interchangeable. The system checks that the bottle is the release it is supposed to be, that there is enough evidence to support its description and that it meets the catalogue’s eligibility rules.

Research about a grape, region or style can help explain a wine, but it is not automatically evidence about every bottle made from that grape or in that place.

Once a release is eligible, the recommendation engine ranks it against the brief created by your answers.

Style, occasion, budget and how far you want to move from the familiar all matter. A higher price does not make a bottle rank better simply because it costs more.

The engine follows defined recommendation rules. It does not rearrange results because a retailer, producer or commercial partner would prefer one bottle to appear above another.

Find a Bottle will show no more than three bottles for a brief. It does not add weaker options simply to make a result page look complete.

If fewer bottles clear the relevant checks and fit what you asked for, the answer gets shorter. If none do, Find a Bottle says so.

An empty result is information too. It means the current catalogue cannot support a recommendation confidently enough for that brief yet.

Retailer price and availability are checked automatically and recorded with a time stamp. They can change quickly, so Find a Bottle tells you when that information was last checked and asks you to confirm current details with the retailer.

If a fresh check cannot be completed reliably, Feeling Vine does not silently pretend that older information is current. Where last-known-good information is still shown, its age is disclosed.

Budget is part of the brief, not a quality score. A more expensive bottle does not receive preference simply for being more expensive, and a bottle below your budget can still be the best answer.

Where you can buy a wine and whether it deserves to appear are separate decisions. Retailer price, availability and links do not determine the recommendation order.

Nobody can pay Feeling Vine to be recommended or to rank higher.

Feeling Vine may in future earn money through retailer links, partnerships or clearly labelled sponsored work. Those relationships will be disclosed and kept separate from the recommendation rules and editorial judgement.

Feeling Vine uses software, automation and AI-assisted tools where they are useful. They can help gather and organise research, process data, check retailer information, test systems and apply recommendation rules consistently.

They cannot create a tasting that did not happen or turn researched evidence into personal experience.

Feeling Vine is founder-led. I set the editorial standards, catalogue rules and recommendation methodology. The recommendation engine then applies defined rules to the eligible catalogue rather than requiring a person to hand-pick every result.

That distinction matters. Human judgement defines what the system is allowed to do. Automation helps the system do it consistently.