{"id":12303,"date":"2015-07-18T19:24:15","date_gmt":"2015-07-18T19:24:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wineanorak.com:\/wineblog\/?p=12303"},"modified":"2015-07-18T19:24:15","modified_gmt":"2015-07-18T19:24:15","slug":"tasting-notes-are-really-bad-arent-they","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.wineanorak.com:\/wineblog\/uncategorized\/tasting-notes-are-really-bad-arent-they","title":{"rendered":"Tasting notes are really bad, aren’t they?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"tasting<\/p>\n

I think I really hate tasting notes. But I write them all the time. Have to. It’s a large part of my job.<\/p>\n

I don’t think my tasting notes are absolutely the worst of all. But I still dislike them, for several reasons.<\/p>\n

First of all, most tasting notes are silly. This is largely because it is incredibly difficult to describe the sensations we experience as we taste wine in a verbal way. There’s a famous quote from the music world, which is attributed to a chap called Martin Mull: ‘Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.’ (You can follow the\u00a0development of this quote here<\/a>.) The same could be said for writing about wine, or at least the experience of tasting wine. It’s an abstract activity.<\/p>\n

Second, tasting notes are opaque to normal people. I reckon that most normal people find a regular tasting note completely weird. The result? Tasting notes scare people away from wine.<\/p>\n

Linked to this: third, tasting notes are mostly over elaborate. As such, they intimidate normal people, who feel that they are clearly having a diminished experience of wine, because they just don’t get all those exotic flavour descriptors when they taste the same wine as a journalist has described. Wine journalists and critics seem to feel the need to make their tasting notes sound very grand with lots of exotic and beautiful-sounding descriptors. But people are really bad at identifying more than a couple of odours in a mixture when they try it in a laboratory. I think many wine writers are bluffing when they write their notes, or they are failing to be honest with themselves about what they are really experiencing.<\/p>\n

Fourth, the language we have for wine is more of a learned code than it is an accurate description of what we experience as we taste wine. When I first started trying to write down my experiences of wine in words, I struggled. I got better after I learned the code, by reading lots of other tasting notes of similar wines.<\/p>\n

Fifth, tasting notes tend to be reductionist. We break down the wine into separate components as we describe it. This is a mistake, in that we forget that the wine is a whole. Unless we look at the global properties of a wine \u2013 considering it in its entirety \u2013 we usually fail to capture its essence, and our notes don’t really have much use.<\/p>\n

I’m not advocating abandoning the tasting note altogether. It has its uses. I don’t want us to return to the few- word descriptions of the English wine elite: good body, tight finish, nice breeding. But I think we need to examine ourselves: how can our notes be more useful and more honest? How can we do better?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I think I really hate tasting notes. But I write them all the time. Have to. It’s a large part of my job. I don’t think my tasting notes are…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12303","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wineanorak.com:\/wineblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12303","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wineanorak.com:\/wineblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wineanorak.com:\/wineblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wineanorak.com:\/wineblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wineanorak.com:\/wineblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12303"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.wineanorak.com:\/wineblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12303\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12306,"href":"https:\/\/www.wineanorak.com:\/wineblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12303\/revisions\/12306"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wineanorak.com:\/wineblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12303"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wineanorak.com:\/wineblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12303"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wineanorak.com:\/wineblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12303"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}