The Inner Life of the Wine Review

Filed under: wine writing — Tom C December 11, 2006 @ 4:59 pm
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drunk monk

At least two or three nights a week, with my dinners, I open a bottle of wine that I’ve previously selected and purchased for our shelves, and scribble some notes in a little black notebook that I later re-assemble into a (hopefully) helpful sketch for a wine’s care and use. And, after writing a couple of hundred of these little thumbnails, I’ve learned to tease out the overall spirit of a wine for the drinker with relative ease - it’s just like anything else: practice, practice…But, then there are also a few nights a week when I’ll decide to open a bottle that I’ve previously reviewed, or one that already carried a “professional” review that has obviated my efforts. In these cases, I leave the notebook closed, and simply let the wine “wash over” my consciousness.

So the main difference in these two scenarios is really only in the writing itself - bottles are selected, corks pulled, and wines are poured ,eyeballed, sniffed, sipped and swallowed just the same - it’s just a matter of whether a cluster of descriptive words eventually fill up a few lines on a page or not. But while doing this now very commonplace activity, a very interesting phenomenon struck me the other day, namely, that my perception of a wine “differs” if I’m writing about it or not. I found it almost like a sort of “Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle” within wine criticism: that the very observation and documentation of the consumption of any given wine changes the actual perception of the wine itself. To be clear, in some wines the perception of black cherries or rough tannins for example jump so directly to mind that one cannot fail to perceive them, and perhaps more importantly CONCEIVE them - perceptions that are so strong and obvious that the very WORDS “black cherry” or “rough tannins” jump directly into the forefront of the mind. But so much more frequently, when I’m just drinking and enjoying a wine with no analysis and documentation involved, a retrospective look at that just-finished bottle evokes only vague or even non existant particular sensations of this or that PARTICULAR aroma or texture. Both the in-the-moment perceptions as well as the memories of an “undocumented” wine’s characteristics just post-drinking seem more emotional, more “right brain” if you will. I can always “feel” how much I appreciated the wine, but am often very much at odds to “quantify” what I just experienced without pouring another glass, and shifting myself into “analysis” mode.

So here’s the question: Does the act of critical analysis of a wine highten, diminish, or simply differentiate the ultimate level of pleasure derived from the experience?

Tom Ciocco

11 Comments »

  1. Excellent blog and excellent post. I’ve experienced the exact same phenomenon. I mostly chalk it up to the absence of food with the wine when I’m analyzing a wine before or after dinner. For me, both wine experiences are equally pleasurable. The wine with dinner offers the visceral pleasure of a beverage that complements food so well, while the analysis provides the more intellectual pleasure of exloring the marvelous variety of flavors that can be produced from a single basic ingredient: grape juice.

    Comment by NickG — December 11, 2006 @ 10:15 pm

  2. NickG-

    Thanks for the your interest and kind words. For me the inclusion/exclusion of food is never a factor since I NEVER review wines without a plate of food in front of me. For me it’s a matter of “intention” - essentially I think different parts of ones consciousness are at work in the two scenarios. I think it’s clear that the purely sensory scenario is “prime”, but the “analytical” approach to a wine, at least for me, crystallizes and completes the sensorial side of things, though I believe that discussing the wine with a drinking partner has the identical effect, i.e. moving the sensations from the inner world to the outer world - somewhat analogous to the notion that thoughts and the speaking of those thoughts are NEVER precisely the same things.

    TOM CIOCCO

    Comment by admin — December 12, 2006 @ 10:43 am

  3. I always, or nearly always, drink my wine with food. I very often start drinking the wine before I sit down to eat, to eventually it will accompany the meal. That being said, I do not “critically analyze” the wine. I enjoy (or not) the wine, but do take pleasure in recognizing the characteristics (flavors on the nose and palate, body, texture, acidity, tannins) that make it so. I don’t find writing any of it to add or detract from the pleasure. IMHO.

    Comment by Julius — December 12, 2006 @ 10:50 am

  4. Julius-

    Everyone derives pleasure from wines in subtly different ways, but the analysis that I do is not for my own pleasure (though I enjoy doing it) but rather to allow me to write the reviews that appear on our site or on the “shelf talkers” that appear on our shelves - doing this is part of what I must do in my job here at WL, though some non-professional wine lovers do indeed keep tasting notebooks as a record of their drinking.

    TOM CIOCCO

    Comment by admin — December 12, 2006 @ 11:24 am

  5. I do keep my own personal tasting notebook (well, an e-notebook at corkd.com/people/nasv ). I personally find thinking about the wine and where it came from to heighten my “experience” with the bottle - it is part of what fascinates me about wine, in addition to its taste and its taste with food. Great post!
    -Nico

    Comment by Nico — December 12, 2006 @ 12:27 pm

  6. I don’t have a nose. That is, I don’t have a nose that seems to discover the varied scents that other noses recognize. Perhaps my nose and I need some training? I know I like different types of wine and do recognize certain differences, but to say that this wine has a “black cherry” or “chocolate” or “strawberry” or “a hint of fall” is beyond me. But that doesn’t stop me from trying. I still try to read James Joyce though I only get a sentence every now and then.

    Comment by Jim — December 12, 2006 @ 2:05 pm

  7. I enjoy wine at a height any Oenophile would aspire to. I also critique and analyze wine almost constantly. Analyzing a wine has naturally come with educating myself with a broad base of wine knowledge. I analyze wine to recommend to family and friends while family and friends ask me to analyze wine for them, eagerly awaiting my opinion on their latest find. It’s all so enjoyable I don’t think of the analysis as anything other than part of the tasting and enjoying process!

    Comment by Brandon M — December 12, 2006 @ 3:50 pm

  8. Jim-

    So glad that this sort of comment came out. There are so many people who feel the way that you do, and I’m here to say that there’s hope! The first question I ask folks who tell me this is “How long have you been trying to make these kinds of identifications?” So many folks think that they can just stick their noses into a glass and write like a wine critic. Think back to your childhood…those big kids doing the figure 8s with their new bikes…they made it look so easy…and you, still struggling to even stay up on two wheels for more than 10 feet…but then one day, you manage a squiggly ride of 30 feet, then 50, and by the end of the week, it’s figure 8s for you too!

    What I’m getting at in a goofy sort of way is that practice makes perfect…listen, doing critical reviews of wines is like any other (semi) arcane pursuit: it’s all about desire and effort. To employ a sports analogy: can every baseball player grow up to become Willie Mays? No, but EVERYONE can IMPROVE their skills if they want to get better, and make the effort to do so.

    Hey, I wasn’t born with a golden nose, and I wouldn’t even say that I’ve yet developed one, but practice makes perfect! Keep trying and I’ll bet one day, a choclate covered strawberry will come flying out of your glass and hit you straight in the septum…just one thing, with all that effort, don’t forget to ENJOY the wine too!

    TOM CIOCCO

    Comment by admin — December 12, 2006 @ 4:16 pm

  9. How does sex feel?

    It is one thing to analyze the components in detail (rub here, feels good).

    It is another thing completely to try and grasp and describe in words the entire experience. Boom!

    Excellent wine for thought! - j

    Comment by eljefe — December 13, 2006 @ 1:30 am

  10. I just finished, Monday, a massive tasting of about 50 wines from my portfolio. We had a round table tasting in a clinical setting to break the wines down by color, aroma, palate and finish to make tasting notes for our US Tech sheets. Would we have prefered to have these with foods? YES, but in this case we had to take the clinical professional tasting approach. We all made sure to take wines with us to try later that evening with food.
    Phil

    Comment by Phil Ward — December 13, 2006 @ 8:18 am

  11. Thanks for the encouragement, Tom. I will certainly keep trying. After all there are worse things to practice than savoring wines.

    Comment by Jim — December 13, 2006 @ 1:23 pm

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