What visCIX records

Official means primary

Accepted sources are producer sites, official PDFs, packaging and brand-owner pages. Retailer copy, affiliate copy, press, Wikipedia, blogs and third-party reviews do not create flavour evidence.

Flavour is not production

Nose, palate and finish wording may create flavour concepts. Cask, age, region, grain, filtration and ABV remain production facts. A bourbon or sherry cask never creates vanilla, oak, sherry or fruit automatically.

Images are a separate layer

Licensed product photography is presentation and commerce media. Image pixels, labels and OCR never create flavour concepts, production facts or evidence statements. If an approved asset is missing, visCIX falls back to its wordmark rather than importing another image.

Normalization

Each chip points to a concept, a statement, an exact character span and its primary source. Exact mappings use direct words or allow-listed lexical variants. Derived mappings require explicit approval; taxonomy 3.0.0 enables none. Cooling terms such as menthol remain unassigned.

Taxonomy addenda

3.0.0 addendum · 2026-08-29: peach / peaches is recorded as exact concept peach under Fresh fruit. No new dimension or derived mapping.

Six dimensions

1. Peat & smoke
2. Fresh fruit
3. Sherry & dried fruit
4. Vanilla & oak
5. Spice & pepper
6. Maritime & salt

Unassigned terms remain in the data model without being forced into one of these dimensions.

Silence

“Silent in the official notes” means that no valid official flavour statement maps to that dimension under the current taxonomy. It does not say the flavour is absent from the whisky.

Version and provenance

Every current profile and comparison uses taxonomy 3.0.0. Evidence retains source kind, primary URL, retrieval date, verification date, locus and verbatim wording.