Not by style, not by region, and not by how a whisky is marketed — by the stage of production that produces the compound. A guest sets points on this compass; every bottle in the catalogue is described on the same sixteen.
The quadrant is a grouping for people reading the compass. It carries no weight in the matching — the geometry treats all sixteen characters alike.
What the grain brings before anything is done to it. Barley, its malting, and the cereal and green notes that survive fermentation — the character of the raw material rather than of any process applied to it.
What fermentation and distillation make. Esters and higher alcohols formed in the washback and shaped by the cut, the still’s geometry and the speed it is run at. This is where a distillery’s house character is decided.
What the wood gives and takes over years. Compounds drawn out of oak, out of whatever the cask held before, and out of the char — plus the harsher notes the wood removes. The longest-acting influence, and the most declarable.
Smoke and the sea. Peat phenols carried through malting, and the maritime character of coastal maturation. Set apart from the other three because its compounds are distinct and it is the most immediately recognisable of the four origins.
A point says what a flavour is. Distance from the centre alone says how much.
Each character, its descriptors, and the congener class it is anchored to.
The compass is our own, built from the sensory-science literature on what whisky is actually made of — which compounds arise at which stage of production, and which of them a person can reliably tell apart. The grouping into four origins follows that chemistry rather than any convention of how whisky is usually described.
The taxonomy on this page is published in full. The calibration that turns evidence into a score — band thresholds, penalty weights, the phenol and cask mappings, the merge constants — is not.
How the matching works →