This guide has been updated in July 2019 to reflect our new tasting note search engine - some of the functionality described below is still pending and will be released soon.
This article is a guide about how to use this site's tasting-notes search facility. Our tasting-notes database now contains hundreds of thousands of wine reviews, so any system to navigate such large numbers inevitably becomes somewhat involved. Here, we look at the basics of how to find the wines you are looking for, including a few handy tips.
Step one: finding the tasting note search form
From any page, simply click on Tasting notes in the main navigation menu. On desktop view, it is visible in the menu bar across the top of the window. In mobile and tablet view it is accessed by opening the drop-down menu in the top-left corner of the screen.
Step two: navigating the tasting-note landing page
On desktop view, our tasting notes landing page shows four tabs of highlights, including recently added standalone notes, top ten producers, top ten vintages and top ten wines for drinking now. The search panel can be seen to the left of the page. On mobile and tablet view, the search panel is revealed by clicking the show filters button.
Step three: keyword search
Entering a term in the keyword search box will automatically produce a series of possible matches. You can click on any of these specific wines or producers, or search for that term in across the entire tasting note database by clicking the top ‘in all categories’ match. This will return all results which feature that word in all fields. It may be useful to use the filters to refine your search. Alternatively, you can use multiple keywords. So, searching for Chablis 2012 generates a list of that appellation from only that vintage.
If you wish to search for a term within the description of the wine, the tasting note itself, tick the checkbox immediately below the keyword search box. For example, if you do this for the term GV, you will find all the wines we have flagged as good value.
Step four: filtering
The search form also has a series of drop-down menus to allow you to choose various specific categories. This can be used with or without a keyword to narrow down your search criteria. So, for example, if you wanted to find every 2011 red wine deemed GV by Julia, your search criteria would look as follows:
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Whereas a search for all Italian whites scoring 17 or over which are within their drinking window in 2017 would look like this:
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You can also click the Standalone option if you want to see only those tasting notes which were not published as part of a tasting article.
NB: the filtering drop-down menus are faceted - that is, they will show only those options that are relevant to the other search criteria specified. That means that in the more specific your search, the fewer options become available in filters. This is to avoid creating a ‘no results’ combination. So for example, if you search for 2016 reds deemed GV by Julia, the appellation filter will shortlist only those appellations which contain wines fulfilling those criteria.
Step five: sorting
Each of the seven columns in the tasting results page is sortable - that is, it can be clicked on once to arrange the results in ascending order, and again to arrange them in descending order. The default layout is alphabetically ascending by producer, but you could re-arrange them by clicking on Date tasted twice to show the most recently written notes first, for example.
Finally, if you want to start from scratch, clicking the clear filters button will return you to a blank search form.
Happy hunting!