Every wine app in the world will tell you that a particular Barolo scores 94 points. What none of them can tell you — until now — is whether you will love it.

That distinction is everything.

A 94-point score is an average. It’s the distilled opinion of critics, collectors, and ten thousand strangers on the internet, collapsed into a single number that has almost nothing to do with your specific, personal taste. You might adore wines that critics call “rustic.” You might find “elegant” wines thin and disappointing. The number doesn’t know you. It never will.

A palate profile does.

What a Palate Profile Actually Is

Your palate profile is a map of your taste preferences — not what you think you should like, but what genuinely lights you up when you drink. It’s built from signals: the wines you’ve tried, how you responded to them, the characteristics that keep appearing in the bottles you reach for again.

Sommvi tracks these signals across six dimensions:

Boldness — Do you gravitate toward wines that fill the room, or ones that whisper?

Tannin — That drying, grippy sensation in red wines. Some people find it satisfying structure. Others find it astringent. Your response is deeply personal, partly genetic.

Acidity — The bright, mouthwatering quality that makes a Chablis feel electric and a Riesling feel alive. High-acid wines are polarising. Your profile knows which side you’re on.

Earthiness — The forest floor, the truffle, the mineral edge. Classic in Burgundy and Barolo. If your first instinct is “this smells like a cellar” and you mean it as a compliment, that says something specific about your palate.

Fruit — Not sweetness — the character and intensity of fruit expression. A Napa Cabernet and a Côtes du Rhône both have fruit, but one announces itself like a fanfare and the other weaves it quietly through the wine.

Floral — Violets in a young Nebbiolo. Orange blossom in a Viognier. Rose petal in a Pinot Noir. The presence or absence of this character, and how much you respond to it, is one of the more distinctive markers of a palate.

These six axes form a shape. Your shape. And it’s as individual as a fingerprint.

How It Gets Built

Here’s what’s unusual about Sommvi’s approach: your palate profile is never finished.

Most wine apps ask you to rate wines explicitly. You drink something, you assign it stars, the algorithm updates. It’s functional, but it’s limited — it relies entirely on your conscious, deliberate self-reporting. And we’re often terrible narrators of our own preferences.

Sommvi learns differently. When you scan a label, when you add something to your cellar, when you tell the sommelier you loved a bottle or that something wasn’t for you, when you take the palate quiz — every interaction is a signal. The profile builds quietly in the background, getting sharper with each bottle you encounter.

The quiz accelerates it. In about four minutes, we give you a series of choices between wine styles, and your answers let us anchor your profile quickly — so you don’t have to drink fifty bottles before the recommendations start making sense. Most users find the recommendations feel genuinely accurate within their first week.

Why This Changes the Way You Discover Wine

The traditional model of wine discovery is recommendation by similarity: you liked wine A, so here’s wine B, which is similar to wine A. It’s the same logic as a playlist that keeps playing the same genre because you liked one song.

Palate-profile recommendations work differently. They look at what underlying characteristics you respond to, and find wines that express those characteristics — even when the wine itself is nothing like what you’ve tried before.

This is how you end up discovering that a dedicated Bordeaux drinker might fall for a good Priorat. Or that someone who loves Chablis might adore a dry Alsatian Riesling. The surface-level similarity isn’t there, but the palate-level alignment is.

That’s the discovery Sommvi is built for: not “more of what you know,” but “exactly what you’d love that you haven’t found yet.”

Your Profile Is Yours Alone

One of the quieter principles behind Sommvi is that there are no wrong answers in wine. The palate profile isn’t judging you for preferring approachable reds over austere classics. It’s not nudging you toward what critics celebrate. It’s mapping you, accurately and honestly, so it can serve you better.

A wine that scores 88 points but aligns perfectly with your palate profile is a better bottle for you than a 96-point wine that doesn’t.

The critics can have their scores. You can have your sommelier.