Nota bene / nota male

In the summer 2005 issue (#69) of The Art of Eating, Patrick Matthews argues in his article "The Revolution in Wine Is Not That Simple" that the current form of most published wine tasting notes - essentially a string of aroma and flavor analogies, many of them referring to fruits - influences what people look for in wine:

"Consumers started to expect wine to be filled with readily identifiable fruit aromas, so winemakers learned to make highly aromatic wines. Wines in less fruity styles - such as sherry and the other traditional 'rancio' or 'maderized' wines from around the Mediterranean, or mineral wines such as the best Chenin Blanc - fell by the wayside." (page 38)

This is an intriguing argument, and it got me thinking about tasting notes. Matthews writes that the very notion of articulating a sensory experience in a tasting note is a fairly recent thing. Assuming that this open Pandora's bottle is not likely to be recorked any time soon, I suggest that there are three ways of going about writing the sensory experience tasting note: the scientific, the solipsistic, and the poetic.

The scientific approach probably is best exemplified by Dr. Ann Noble's Aroma Wheel. Dr. Noble developed not only a standardized set of terms for describing wine aromas, but recipes for creating the reference standard aromas to which the terms refer (e.g., to find out what "Black olive" on the Aroma Wheel refers to, put 4-6 mL brine from canned black olives in 25 mL white or red base wine). There are all kinds of methodological and philosophical problems with this approach, but the intent is clear - to create a more-or-less common and reproducible vocabulary for what people (or scientists, anyway) smell in various wines. How such a vocabulary, even if it's achievable, might help me understand, buy, or enjoy wine isn't clear, but that's probably not its intent.

The solipsistic approach eschews all pretense of objectivity and instead proclaims the taster's own experience of the wine during the moment of tasting. This approach is a curious assemblage of humility ("it's just my experience...") and arrogance ("...and all of my adoring readers are dying to hear about it!"). From the pen of a talented writer, solipsism can be entertaining, but it's seldom informative.

Thus we are left with the poetic approach. My friend and wine industry colleague Chad Arnold is fond of describing Loire Valley chenin blanc as smelling like "wet concrete in November" (or October - depending on the wine). It so happens that Chad is a poet as well as a wine nerd. Is his description better than "wet minerals, honeycomb, and ultra-ripe pears"? I don't know. I do know that when I taste Loire chenin now, wet sidewalks after a late fall rain often are what I think of first.