What a flavour wheel is for
It gives a shared starting vocabulary. Faced with an unfamiliar cup, most people can say 'floral' before they can say 'osmanthus', and a wheel lets them move outward from the family to the specific term. It is a scaffold for describing, not a classification of what is chemically present.
TeaHQ’s families, and why there are only fifteen
Floral, fruity, citrus, sweet, vegetal, grassy, roasted, nutty, smoky, woody, earthy, mineral, creamy, chocolate, spice and umami. Deliberately coarse: a wheel with two hundred terms filters nothing, because no two people place a tea in the same leaf-node. Every one of these is used by at least three teas in the catalogue, and a test enforces that — a descriptor that stops earning its place gets removed rather than kept for completeness.
Mouthfeel and aroma are separate axes
A wheel that mixes what a tea tastes of with how it feels produces confusion, because a tea can be floral and drying, or floral and silky, and those are different teas. TeaHQ keeps three axes apart: flavour family, mouthfeel and structure, and aroma. Intensity sits separately again on the numeric axes each tea carries.
The limitations, stated
A wheel encodes the vocabulary of whoever built it, and vocabularies are cultural — Chinese tea vocabulary has concepts such as hui gan, the returning sweetness, and yan yun, the rock character, that no English wheel captures. It also cannot express change across infusions, which is most of what makes a good oolong good. Use it as a way in rather than as a description of the territory.