How wine origins work

Two questions, two answers

Every wine on the site carries two pieces of geographic information, and it helps to see them as answering different questions.

• Region — where the grapes grew. A place on a map. Always knowable, whatever the label says.
• Appellation — what regulated name the wine carries. A legal designation. Optional — plenty of wines are labelled "Vin de France", "Vino de Mesa", "Vino", "Landwein" and carry no regulated origin at all.

A Cascina Tavijn wine from Monferrato in Piedmont, declassified and sold as Vino da Tavola, still comes from Monferrato. It has a region (Monferrato → Piemonte → Italy) and no appellation. Search "Piedmont" and you'll find it.

A Barolo, on the other hand, has both — a region (the village, then Langhe, then Piedmont) and an appellation (Barolo DOCG).

The breadcrumb

Each wine page shows a breadcrumb like "France › Beaujolais › Morgon › Morgon AOC". That's one sentence telling you: country, broader region, specific village or zone, and — if there is one — the appellation.

Sometimes the chain is shorter ("Italy › Piedmont" for a wine with only the region known). Sometimes it's deeper ("France › Champagne › Côte de Sézanne › Barbonne-Fayel › Champagne AOC" for a Grower Champagne from a specific Aube-adjacent village).

The deeper the chain, the more we know. A wine sitting at just "France" means we know the country but nothing else — usually the contributor didn't have more information at hand.

Search and filter

The wine catalogue lets you filter by any point along that breadcrumb. Click "Burgundy" and you get every wine from anywhere in Burgundy, from a village-labelled Gevrey-Chambertin right down to a generic Bourgogne AOC. Click "Morgon" and you get just the Morgon wines.

The filter walks the wine's breadcrumb — so if a contributor tagged a wine at a specific village, you'll find it there. If the contributor only knew the country, you'll only find it at country level.

Cross-region appellations, and why sometimes a filter can feel off

A handful of appellations officially cover more than one region. Cava DO is the famous one — it covers parts of seven Spanish regions (Catalonia, Aragon, Navarra, La Rioja, Valencia, Extremadura, Basque Country). Italian examples include Lugana DOC (Veneto + Lombardia), Prosecco DOC (Veneto + Friuli), Delle Venezie DOC.

For these wines we follow a simple rule: the wine's region tells you where it was made; the appellation tells you what label it carries. A Cava produced in Almendralejo, Extremadura shows up under "Extremadura" because that's where it was made, even though its appellation is Cava DO. A Cava produced in Penedès shows up under "Penedès" for the same reason.

If a wine appears in a region filter and you weren't expecting it, the likely reason is that the contributor knew only the appellation and not the specific production location, so the wine defaults to the appellation's most common home (Penedès for Cava, Veneto for Lugana, etc.). If you know better, the wine's edit page lets you refine the region: pick the appellation as usual, then use the More specific region picker that appears below to pin the actual sub-region. The same picker also lets you tag a Vin de France wine as coming from Côte d'Or, or any other case where the appellation is broader than the place.

Cross-sub-region blends

Many Champagne houses and Bordeaux estates blend grapes from more than one sub-region. Bollinger uses Aÿ Pinot Noir plus Côte des Blancs Chardonnay. Egly-Ouriet's Les Prémices blends fruit from Ambonnay, Bisseuil and Vrigny. The wine has to appear somewhere under a regional filter, and we tag it at the sub-region it's most associated with — the house's home village, or the dominant source for the blend.

This is an editorial call, not strict ground truth. It makes "show me Champagne wines from Aÿ" return the Bollinger you expect. It does mean a very purist reading of a multi-region blend would disagree with the tag. Both positions are defensible; we chose the one that makes everyday browsing more useful.

What isn't here yet

• Single-vineyard detail for many regions. We have Grand Cru lieux-dits for Alsace, villages for Burgundy and Champagne, MGA-level detail for a slice of Piedmont. Many other regions are still at sub-region granularity only. Over time more villages and crus will appear as they're needed.
• Multi-value geography (a wine from two villages, a single bottling shared across appellations). The current model chooses one canonical home per wine; the edit form is the safety valve when that guess is wrong.

If a wine on the site looks tagged in a place you know is wrong — the edit page takes corrections. That's how the catalogue gets better.