About Our Sources
Original First-Party Content
All varietal descriptions on this site are original first-party educational copy written specifically for Encyclopedia of Wine. We do not reproduce, aggregate, or repackage descriptions from third-party wine publications, ratings services, or review databases.
What We Do Not Use
- Third-party ratings or numerical scores
- Wine review text from critics or publications
- Aggregated user reviews
- Scraped or licensed descriptions from other encyclopedias
Source Types We Use
TTB / COLA Registry via Wine Grabber
The Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau (TTB) maintains the Certificate of Label Approval (COLA) public registry, which records approved wine labels in the United States. Wine Grabber indexes this public registry and makes label record counts available by varietal. These counts are factual public record, not editorial assessments.
Original Authored Copy
Short descriptions for each varietal are authored directly by our team. They describe the grape variety, its typical characteristics, and its geographic associations, drawing on publicly available viticultural literature. No prose is copied from third-party sources.
Record Counts
Where shown, label record counts reflect the number of approved COLA records associated with a given varietal in the Wine Grabber registry. These counts are updated periodically and reflect the state of the public registry at the time of last indexing, not real-time data.
American Viticultural Areas (AVAs)
U.S. wine appellation definitions come from TTB regulations under 27 CFR Part 9, which is U.S. federal law and therefore public domain. Educational summaries are original first-party explanations written for Encyclopedia of Wine — they are not copied from commercial wine guides, trade publications, or other wine encyclopedias.
No European Union geographical indications (GIs), French Appellations d'Origine Contrôlée (AOC), Italian Denominazioni di Origine Controllata (DOC), or other non-U.S. regional designations are included in this release.
Glossary Terms
Glossary definitions published on this site are based on owner-provided first-party material with editorial cleanup. They are not copied from third-party glossaries, commercial wine education sites, or Wikipedia. The source for each glossary term is noted on the term's page.
Terms may be refined or expanded as the knowledge base grows. No health claims are asserted. Where wine components are discussed in relation to health (for example, resveratrol), definitions reflect the state of scientific study rather than establishing medical conclusions.