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For over fifteen years, the Terre de Vins teams have travelled the vineyards to meet winemakers, tell their stories and document their wines. Over time, this fieldwork has built a precious asset: thousands of tasting comments, notes and analyses covering wines from every region and every style. With Tastee, these archives, previously scattered across a multitude of Excel files, have been brought together and structured into a single database, opening the door to a new way of activating these years of tasting expertise.
For fifteen years, every issue published by Terre de Vins generated its share of tasting notes. The practice was straightforward and consistent in principle: journalists' comments were recorded in Excel files, one per issue, accumulating to nearly 120 files over the years.
The result: a genuinely rich archive, but one fragmented to the extreme. Finding the tasting history of a domaine, comparing notes on the same cuvée across vintages, or simply checking whether a wine had already been reviewed... all questions without a quick answer.
The work carried out with Terre de Vins involved integrating all of this content in a structured way into Tastee. The data was processed, reformatted, homogenised, then loaded into a dedicated comment database. One of the major challenges of this project: domaine and cuvée names had changed over the years. Variable spellings, shortened names, updated denominations. The core of the work involved reconciling these variations to link each comment to the right entity, whether a domaine, a cuvée or a vintage.
What previously required lengthy manual searches has become an instant query.
Once centralised, this data enables an entirely new reading of the tastings carried out by Terre de Vins over the years.
Comments accumulated on the same wine or appellation reveal trends: recurring aromatic profiles, stylistic shifts from one vintage to the next, characteristics shared by different tasters years apart. Information that, in the original Excel files, was simply inaccessible at this scale.
For Terre de Vins, these structured archives become a genuine editorial and analytical tool. A searchable memory that deepens understanding of the wines tasted and their evolution over time.
This digitised heritage opens up many possibilities: thematic analyses of vintage trends, average appellation profiles, tracking the stylistic evolution of estates followed over several years. But it is in Terre de Vins events that this potential has found its first concrete expression.
At Bordeaux Tasting 2025, journalists' tasting comments were mobilised to build personalised journeys for visitors. Based on the cuvées present at the event, Tastee analysed the Terre de Vins editorial archives to extract the dominant aromatic and taste profiles of each wine. These profiles were then matched against each visitor's declared preferences, gathered via a questionnaire completed before arrival, to generate a bespoke ten-step tasting journey. Discover how here.
An experience that foreshadows what Champagne Tasting, coming in April, will look like: the same format, enriched by the lessons learned in Bordeaux, and applied this time to the world of Champagne.
Today, the ambition reaches well beyond activating existing archives. The goal is to instantly archive every tasting carried out by the editorial team, on an ongoing basis, as they happen. Not just the comments published in the magazine, but all the notes taken by journalists during their visits, press tastings and wine selections: every impression, every field tasting becomes structured data, immediately accessible and usable.
Tastee thus becomes the infrastructure for Terre de Vins' sensory memory. A base that grows every day, enriched with every bottle opened, and that provides a decisive advantage for better understanding wines, personalising experiences and building an ever more precise relationship with readers and visitors.
The Terre de Vins case illustrates a common situation in the wine world: years of tastings exist, documented, but rarely exploited in full for lack of structured archiving. Specialist magazines, négociants, trade bodies, competitions: many hold a considerable heritage of tasting comments, often dispersed across heterogeneous formats that are difficult to query.
By structuring them in Tastee, these archives take on a new dimension. They become a knowledge base capable of informing future tastings, enriching wine experiences and building, over time, a genuine collective memory in service of the whole industry.
More information about Terre de Vins.
