How Tasteladder works
We score every wine from 1 to 5 on eight sensory dimensions, ask you to describe your taste on the same scale, then rank wines by how closely they match - adjusted for the food you're eating, your budget, and the grapes and styles you love or want to avoid. No black box, no mysticism. Here's exactly how it happens.
The eight dimensions
Wine tasting can feel subjective, but most of what you actually notice in a glass comes down to a handful of measurable sensations. We use eight of them, each rated 1 to 5:
- Body - how light or full it feels, from delicate to mouth-filling.
- Sweetness - bone dry through to dessert-sweet.
- Tannin - the drying grip, from silky to firmly structured.
- Acidity - how soft and round, or crisp and bright, it tastes.
- Fruitiness - subtle and mineral versus generously fruit-forward.
- Earthiness - clean and fresh versus savoury and earthy.
- Oak - unoaked versus the vanilla-and-toast of barrel ageing.
- Finish - how quickly the flavour fades, or how long it lingers.
You move sliders to describe the wine you're in the mood for, and every wine in our catalog carries its own eight scores. That shared language is what makes matching possible.
How we rank your matches
For each wine, we calculate five things and blend them into a single match score:
- Taste-profile similarity - how close the wine's eight scores are to your sliders. This is the dominant factor, worth roughly a third of the score, because it's the best predictor of whether you'll actually enjoy the glass.
- Grape-family match - if you added wines you already love as "seeds," we favour wines from the same family.
- Critic rating - professional scores, where available, nudge well-reviewed wines up.
- Price fit - how well the bottle lands inside your budget.
- Region match - wines from the same place as your seed wines get a small lift.
The five weight sliders in the "fine-tune" panel let you decide how much each factor counts, and the presets set sensible mixes for you. "Match My Taste" leans hard on sensory similarity; "Expert Picks" leans on critic ratings. Crucially, missing data is always treated as neutral, never as a penalty - a wine without a critic score is never punished for it.
What food does
Tell us what you're eating and the matching shifts. Each food carries an ideal range for the dimensions that matter to it. Steak, for instance, wants high body and high tannin; sushi wants high acidity and almost no tannin. Wines that fall inside a dish's ideal ranges get boosted, and poor matches get demoted. Dislikes work the opposite way: a grape or style you exclude is removed from consideration entirely.
A worked example
Say you slide toward full-bodied, dry, grippy tannin, and oaky, and you tell us you're having steak tonight. The engine looks for wines whose profiles sit near yours - and a bottle like Caymus Cabernet Sauvignon from Napa scores extremely well: it's full-bodied, dry, firmly tannic, and generously oaked, almost a mirror of your sliders. Because you chose steak - which favours exactly that high body and tannin - Caymus gets an additional boost, and the result explains why: big tannins scrub the fat from each bite. A lighter, high-acid wine like Kim Crawford Sauvignon Blanc sits far from your sliders and outside steak's ideal range, so it ranks near the bottom. Slide instead toward light, crisp, and low tannin with a plate of oysters, and those two wines swap places entirely. Same engine, different you.
What we are - and what we're not
Honesty is our credibility, so let's be clear. Tasteladder has no sommelier on staff, makes no claim of professional credentials, human expert review, or lab tasting, and never implies a curation that doesn't exist. Our sensory scores are a careful editorial mapping grounded in each wine's well-established character, and our recommendations are a transparent, repeatable calculation - not a person's secret opinion. Some of our content is produced with the assistance of AI editing tools, and all selections reflect independent editorial judgment. We make money through affiliate links when you buy a wine we recommended; you can read exactly how on our disclosure page. We'd rather tell you precisely how the sausage is made than dress it up as magic - because a recommendation you understand is one you can trust.