The Inner Life of the Wine Review

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