I'm aware that no one's perfect and that the same wine won't affect me the same as it did the writer of any given tasting note. And I've surely not tasted every wine whose review I've read so I may yet be impressed by writers with crappy palates. But assuming the veracity of a given review, by a writer whose palate I'm calibrated with and whose judgement I've learned to trust, the following is a prioritorized list of what I look for:
A grocery list of aromas and flavors is purely optional unless they highlight how well a wine adheres to its archtype: currants and cigar box in Bordeaux, nuts in Meursault, etc. Clive Coates manages very well without them.
A feel for the wine's structure and style is paramount. At least tell me if the wine is in a modern style or not. The British writers (as opposed to Robert Parker) do this quite well.
What I value the most is what a writer who knows the wine or region or producer better than I do tells me about the wine's potential and how long it will live. By now, I'm fairly adept at figuring out how good a given wine is now (assuming it's past its early infancy, anyway) but I want to know more about what it will be like as an adult, especially when to open it.
Style-wise, I like some poetry and creativeness if it doesn't obscure the above points. My reasoning is great wines (even great little wines) should have an emotional effect of the taster. I don't enjoy reading notes by jaded tasters who can't be moved emotionally.
PS. Size doesn't (always) matter.
- The wine's potential.
- The wine's structure.
- Sensory descriptors (optional).
- Score (optional).
A grocery list of aromas and flavors is purely optional unless they highlight how well a wine adheres to its archtype: currants and cigar box in Bordeaux, nuts in Meursault, etc. Clive Coates manages very well without them.
A feel for the wine's structure and style is paramount. At least tell me if the wine is in a modern style or not. The British writers (as opposed to Robert Parker) do this quite well.
What I value the most is what a writer who knows the wine or region or producer better than I do tells me about the wine's potential and how long it will live. By now, I'm fairly adept at figuring out how good a given wine is now (assuming it's past its early infancy, anyway) but I want to know more about what it will be like as an adult, especially when to open it.
Style-wise, I like some poetry and creativeness if it doesn't obscure the above points. My reasoning is great wines (even great little wines) should have an emotional effect of the taster. I don't enjoy reading notes by jaded tasters who can't be moved emotionally.
PS. Size doesn't (always) matter.
Comments
Who else do you consider a critic in Israel? Eldad Levi is pretty good but I'm not entirely calibrated to his palate.
Is it you as the first anonymous?
And you never over-use the word "currants"!
My big challenge is to come up with "stereotypes" of wine, more sophisticated than your "oaked fruity CS" such as forest-fruit-CS (Yatir, super Tuscan), leather-berry rosso di montalcino, tea-leaf Ripasso. A very short descriptor of the type of animal you have in the glass, and then the evaluation.
"Cassis" after a 70s soft drink
"new car smell nose"
"candy store nose"
"rhubarb"
Maybe these are all deeply psychological connections I am making in my brain :-)
Jan, don't bother yourself with trying to be more spcific than "red fruits/berries" or "black fruits/berries" or "dried fruits" as descriptions for red wine aromas. Trying to nail down desriptors more specific than these in the context of red wine is impossible. It was part of my research project at Davis, with a very highly selected and then trained panel of tasters. Plenty of folks regarded as critics would have been tossed out in the selection phase alone of the panelists we chose to train, and even after the training people couldn't consistently specify the fruit characteristics of Cabernet more specifically than that. Ie one person's raspberry was another's red cherry was another's strawberry - there was no common language more specific. As for "currants" I don't like the term and haven't a clue as to what that is, but casis or Ribena (a syrup made from the same fruit that makes Creme de Casis liquer) are quite identifiable as berry fruit (not specifically red or black) combined with a potent bell pepper herbaceousness. So noting both casis and bell pepper notes in a wine's aroma is redundant. I prefer to note a green bell pepper or general "herbaceous" note as something apart from wines' specifically fruity aroma. I think your end line "a very short description of the animal in the glass" and then the evaluation is very apt. It's more and more the way I write a TN for myself for one main reason: more detailed grocery list notes are never consistent bottle to bottle, either because of the context of the tasting (or better yet drinking), the condition of the particualr bottle (especially the actual temp at the time of tasting!) or because of your palate at that particular moment. But unless the wine suffers from pretty severe bottle variation, or has received a significant amount of ageing since your last tasting, the "animal in the glass" and the harmony of the wine, alnong with the pleasure it gives (ie the evaluation) should be quite similar.
Do you think it is easier to nail down fruit descriptors in white wines than it is for reds?