Most wine advice either assumes you already know the vocabulary or treats you as someone who never will. There is a lot of room between those two, and that is where everything here lives.

I'm Anastasia Smanyuk, a wine writer and educator based in Meerbusch, Germany, and the founder of Winetellect Projects. I publish in English and German for around 17,000 readers, and I write about the things that actually change how a glass tastes: how to taste with a method instead of a guess, how to read a label in seconds, why a pairing works or falls apart, and where aromas come from.

The goal is never to make you sound knowledgeable. It is to make wine legible, so that choosing a bottle stops being a small act of anxiety.

Why I write about wine this way

Before wine, I spent years in financial due diligence at a Big Four firm. The work was to take the story a company tells about itself and check it against the numbers. Before that, a decade in professional photography and my own studio, which taught me the other half of it: how much of what we believe about a thing comes from how it is presented.

Wine runs on stories. Some are true, many are beautiful, and a few survive no contact with evidence. So the rule here is simple. Claims get checked against primary sources. Marketing language gets stripped out. When something is repeated everywhere but does not hold up, such as the idea that minerality in a wine comes from minerals in the soil, I say so and show the research.

I am currently working toward the WSET Level 3 Award in Wines. I research carefully, name my sources, and correct myself in public when I get something wrong.

Published work

The Confident Taster: A Guided Wine Tasting Journal (English)
Weinverkostung mit System: Das geführte Wein-Tagebuch (German)

Both published by Winetellect Projects in 2026. A hundred guided tasting pages built around a repeatable method, so your notes are still useful to you six months later.

What you'll find here

Guides and a blog on tasting technique, tasting notes, wine labels, food pairing, fermentation and aroma. Wine guides in the shop for when you want it structured. Wine tastings in the Düsseldorf area.

Written in English and German, for anyone who would rather understand wine than perform it.

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contact@winetellect-pro.com