Taste Profile

Most wine apps ask you a few questions on day one and then treat the answer as permanent. But nobody's taste is fixed. The wines you loved three years ago are not reliably the wines you want tonight, and a quiz taken once can't know that.

Your Taste Profile isn't a quiz result. It's a living model of your palate, rebuilt from what you actually drink and rate, and it's the thing every other part of Sommy runs against.

It's built from what you rate, not what you claim

Every wine you rate feeds the model. Not equally, though, and the weighting is where it gets interesting.

Wines you loved count for more than wines you merely tolerated, so your favourites pull the picture harder than your shrugs. And recent ratings carry more weight than old ones, on a curve where a rating's influence roughly halves every three months. A phase you went through two years ago fades rather than haunting your recommendations forever. If your taste genuinely moves, the profile moves with it, without you having to reset anything.

[SCREENSHOT: Taste Profile - the main profile screen showing the radar and the dimension breakdown]

Where you sit, and how far you roam

Sommy measures your palate on the characteristics that actually distinguish wines from each other: body, acidity, tannin, and sweetness among them.

For each one it tracks two separate things. The centre of your taste, which is the obvious part, and the spread around it, which is the part most tools miss. Two people can both average out as medium-bodied red drinkers while one of them drinks nothing else and the other ranges from Beaujolais to Barolo. Sommy knows the difference, which is why one of them gets safe recommendations and the other gets offered a stretch.

Your palate has a name

Underneath the numbers, Sommy matches your profile to a palate archetype. There are eight, and they're the shorthand version of everything above.

The Storm is intense, tannic and uncompromising. The Velvet Hour is rich, smooth and deeply satisfying. The Sun Chaser is bright, fresh and easy to love. The Silk Road is aromatic, refined and complex. If your palate sits close to two of them, you get both, because plenty of people genuinely straddle a line.

You can share the result as a card, radar and all. It's the most fun part of the profile and the easiest way to explain your taste to someone who's buying you a bottle.

You can correct it

The model is inferred, not dictated. If it has read you wrong, or you know something about yourself it hasn't seen yet, you can adjust the dimensions directly rather than rating your way out of it.

Where it shows up

Everywhere, which is the entire point of building it once. Fit Check measures a bottle against it. Pairing applies it on top of the dish. Find Similar uses it to rank neighbours. Vision reads shelves and wine lists through it. Your Pour is built from it.

One model, learned once, applied to every surface. Nothing has to be taught twice.

When it helps, and when it doesn't

The profile gets genuinely useful quickly, but it isn't instant. In the first week it's working from very little, so treat recommendations as a direction rather than a verdict. A couple of dozen honest ratings and it's sharp.

If you're coming from another app, Vivino Import brings your existing ratings across and skips most of that wait. Starting from nothing, Find Your Taste gets you a usable first version in about a minute.

How many wines do I need to rate?

A handful gives Sommy a direction. A couple of dozen makes it genuinely accurate. There's no threshold you have to cross before the app becomes useful, it just keeps sharpening.

Does my profile change over time?

Yes, deliberately. Recent ratings count for more than old ones, so the profile tracks your taste as it moves instead of anchoring to who you were when you signed up.

Can I see what Sommy thinks my taste is?

All of it. The dimensions, the radar, your archetype, and the flavours it associates with you. There's nothing hidden behind a score. Our guide to building a wine profile without the jargon covers the idea in plain terms.