On Useful Tasting Notes
Science tells us wine tasting notes aim for unachievable precision, while common sense tells us they provide little utility. Here's a model for writing more honest and useful ones.
Why do we write wine tasting notes?
We know what we’re meant to do. Describe the appearance of the wine in the glass. Then go on to detail the aromas you can smell while swirling it around. Take a mouthful and slosh it around a bit. Suck air through it, and breathe the wine-laden fumes through your nose. Giving you more vivid sensations. And then write the whole thing down.
But what for? Because over the last three decades I’ve found people aren’t that interested in what I’m tasting. Especially if they aren’t tasting it at the same time. Or they don’t know what to do with what I tell them. Or both.
Over time I’ve come to rely on the three F’s. And these are things people found either interesting, or useful in describing a wine. The F’s are… Feeling, Flavour, and Function.
Let’s start with feeling. Anyone who has done a wine qualification will have been told to be precise when describing wine. To avoid using vague or emotive terms. But a few years ago Bibendum in the UK asked several thousand people what words enticed them to buy wine. The words people liked were fruity, smooth, full-bodied, dry, fresh, velvety, aromatic, rich, elegant…
What most of these words have in common are that they’re vague, emotive, and that they describe texture. How the wine feels. And there seems to be a reason for that. Words that describe how something feels to us as humans, also often describe human qualities.
This is something backed up by other research. Rosario Caballero, and Ernesto Suárez-Toste of the University of Castilla-La Mancha studied 12,000 wine tasting notes. They concluded that…
Most of the time, we personify wine. It has character, it’s endowed with human virtues and vices. It can be generous, sexy, voluptuous, whimsical, shy, demure, bold or aggressive. We almost cannot conceive wine without personifying it.
A couple of years ago at Pix we wanted to test this. So we set up an experiment. It cost a few hundred dollars. We advertised online articles about wine on Google. But in three different conditions.
Let’s say the article was about Rioja. In the first condition we’d say that the wine featured in the article was “smooth and supple”. A feeling or textural descriptor.
In the second condition we’d say the wine featured in the article was “scented with strawberries and oak”. It was a flavour or tasting descriptor.
And in the third condition we’d say the wine featured in the article was “perfect for a family celebration”. A function or use-case descriptor.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Joe Fattorini's Substack to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.