The tier system
What the badges actually promise.
How the match works
Every bottle in the catalog carries a taste profile: five structure dials — body, tannin, acidity, sweetness, fruit — plus the shares of 13 flavour families mined from what drinkers actually taste (oak, citrus, dark fruit, funk …). Eighteen signals in all. The matcher compares profiles within a style, with small nudges for a shared lead grape, the same region and — for sparkling — the same production method.
Dead ringer
The profiles all but overlap. Poured blind on a Tuesday, you’d hesitate. This is the top of the pile — the pairs where the taste distance is as small as our data can measure.
Close cousin
Clearly the same family: a dial or two apart — a touch more tannin, a shade less oak. Most good dupes live here, and most drinkers never notice the difference outside a side-by-side.
Same neighbourhood
Same style, same build, honest resemblance — a sibling, not a twin. We say so instead of rounding up.
What counts as a dupe at all
Tiers measure taste. To be called a dupe, a bottle must also behave like one on the receipt: at most 40% of the splurge’s price, and never more than €70. When nothing qualifies, we say “nothing dupes this” rather than stretch the word.
The honest part
Tier thresholds sit on the live score distribution of the whole catalog, prices are typical retail re-checked with every refresh, and no bottle can buy its way in. All of it is arithmetic on aggregated tasting data: a tier says how close two profiles sit in our numbers, not how a given bottle will taste on your table. No sommeliers were consulted. Several remain annoyed.