When I taste wines, I think of shapes. Simple shapes like rectangles and circles. Some wines are thin narrow vertical rectangles, some are big bold squares, some are smaller circles with an almost fuzzy edge.
A well made cold weather pinot noir feels focused and almost sharp whereas a more entry level warm weather pinot noir can feel broader and more oval. An unoaked chardonnay usually feels thinner and more delicate than an oaked one. A Cabernet Sauvignon is usually bolder than a Pinot Noir. An expensive wine, regardless of grape and origin, should be more focused and energetic than a cheap wine. The focus is a lot of what we think of as quality in wine and what seems reasonable to pay for. And part of the fun and surprise of tasting similar wines at very different price points is to see that sometimes the cheaper wines are more focused and then you can have a fun discussion about about why that might be.
A Framework For Describing What You Taste
This framework has two axis:
The X axis, the horizontal axis, goes from Delicate on the left to Bold on the right. A delicate wine feels thinner in your moth. You could also describe delicate wines as light. Bold wines feel bigger in your mouth and you could also describe them as heavy.
The Y axis, the vertical axis, goes from Soft at the bottom to Focused at the top. The wine you get in a bar that only has an undefined “red” and “white” wine is likely to be quite forgettable and soft. You could also call these wines unstructured. To me they feel like soft shapes in my mouth. A focused wine feels like it has a really clearly defined shape. It’s sharper and at the top end it can even feel energetic. If you get a tasting menu and a wine pairing at a high end restaurant, you should expect all the wines to be focused. And typically the earlier wines are more delicate and the later ones more bold. Still, all of them should be focused.
Plotting Wines
This framework is not scientific or prescriptive. It’s just a way for you to describe what you taste and to be able to discuss the wine with your friends. With that said, here are six wines plotted just to give you an idea of where these kinds of wines would likely fall on the axis.
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High end champagne
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Supermarket sweet sparkling wine
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A great Pinot Noir
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Supermarket $12 Pinot Noir
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The “100 point” Cabernet Sauvignon
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Supermarket Cabernet Sauvignon (and I drew that too wide, it should have been narrower)
Describing The Wines In A Bundle
You can use this framework to describe different kinds of wines as above or you can use it to describe three wines in one of the Fifty States Wine bundles. Let’s say you have three white wines made from the same grape and you are trying to tease out how they are different. In that case you should use the full diagram instead of constraining yourself to just one of the quadrants. Compared to a Cabernet Sauvignon they may all be delicate, but relative to each other, one might be more bold than the others or more focused than the others.
And you should compare notes. In this example we have two people, Green and Orange, who have tasted the same three wines but have described them slightly differently. They agree that 1 is the most delicate but Orange thinks that 2 and 3 are much closer than Green does. And Green thinks 1 and 3 are more focused than Orange does and so forth.
Compare To Understand
ifty States Wine does not sell single bottles. We only sell bundles of wine and each bundle has a theme. In the beginning our bundles are likely to be focused on a grape and showcase that from different regions. Someday we have bundles that contain three wines from different grapes but from the same AVA. Either way, our core idea is that when you focus on three similar wines, you remove a lot of noise, and that allows you to learn, discern, and appreciate a grape or a region. And we think this framework is a good way to plant and describe what you taste so you can tell the wines apart and discuss it with your friends.