Is there a particular cliche in wine that you've tired of?

[R_M_Kriete]

“Burgundy is too expensive”

inevitably followed by…

“I drink great, inexpensive Burgundy all the time. You just don’t know where to look”

[J_a_y_H_a_c_k]

“I only like natural wine.” Oh, instead of wine imported from Mars?

[Markus_S]

… are there ever “bad people” at a winery?

Yes, the ones that will never ever invite you back, the ones where you get shot at because you are on private property, the ones that sue you if you are a critic and they don’t like your review of a wine. I can think of the Burgundy estate that sicced their dogs on Parker would be a “bad guy”.

[M_Passo]

No cliche should be trigger word(s) or cancelled. Everybody’s comments are like any conversation, a dialog taken in context. Listen and evaluate, but to judge on a cliche is too quick and formulaic and it not only devalues the comment, it deters people from commenting. It may boil down to Thumbs Up or Thumps Down—which is fine in my book. Less is more and all is evaluated by me. I’d give this a 93.

[Oliver_McCrum]

‘Fruit-driven.’

[Wes_Barton]

‘Fruit-driven.’

Is that like “couch potato-motivated”?

[Michael_Martin]

It has good legs.

[Chris_Seiber]

No cliche should be trigger word(s) or cancelled. Everybody’s comments are like any conversation, a dialog taken in context. Listen and evaluate, but to judge on a cliche is too quick and formulaic and it not only devalues the comment, it deters people from commenting. It may boil down to Thumbs Up or Thumps Down—which is fine in my book. Less is more and all is evaluated by me. I’d give this a 93.

I generally agree. It’s already very difficult writing tasting notes, and it’s probably not helpful in general that we crap on frequently-used terms and phrases people use.

To put it in the parlance of this thread, I think we should practice minimal intervention so people’s notes can show really well, even if the value of all tasting notes is relative. I mean, these tasting notes are written by good people, and it’s only fruit-driven fermented grape juice they’re writing about anyway.

[RichardFlack]

Any deconstructed Fruit salad especially involving things rarely encountered or overly specific.

This one get tricky. Just because a fruit is rarely used in TNs doesn’t mean that it can’t be a valid descriptor. Miguel de Leon talked about this in an article he penned last year for PUNCH, talking about his experiences as an Asian sommelier attending tastings and trying to describe wines with descriptors that were familiar to him, and yet foreign to many who use most traditional tasting grids.

I agree with the core of what you’re saying, that often people throw a word jumble of fruit descriptors out there or use obscure descriptors when they really aren’t familiar with them at all. It’s mostly posturing. But just because something is seldom used as a descriptor, doesn’t mean it can’t be an apt descriptor in a tasting and we should be careful to not immediately dismiss those.

I think part of what I’m getting at is that wines evolve. So those ultra specific descriptors may not help me in four or five years.

Here’s a question for us all… how old is wine in the typical tasting note that we read?

What I’m looking for in tasting notes is broad indication of style and quality against expectations for the type of wine, and an indication of how it will evolve.

[RichardFlack]

Some one once said that cliches are the most efficient form of communication. (Can’t recall who, it might have been me LOL).

[John_Glas]

“Drink what you like”

I hate this expression. Any wine educator preaching this is not a real educator. We all know the crap out there and as an educator you need to move students away from the corporate crap! Once the student understands the tasting process a lot of this garbage they were drinking is in their rear view mirror.

[John_Glas]

One worded reviews or reviews that you can’t decipher if the wine was liked/disliked

I love people that write a full paragraph but I still can’t figure out what they actually think of the wine.

[John_Glas]

Shop at your local wine shop in you neighborhood!

There are a few wine educators in Minneapolis preaching this crap. Most wine shops by your house in Minneapolis are overpriced. Pass about 20 shops and you will find the right one. Why pay $25 when I can get the same wine for $14.99.

[Nick_Ellis]

… are there ever “bad people” at a winery?

Yes, the ones that will never ever invite you back, the ones where you get shot at because you are on private property, the ones that sue you if you are a critic and they don’t like your review of a wine. I can think of the Burgundy estate that sicced their dogs on Parker would be a “bad guy”.

I think that was Cheval Blanc, not Burgundy. When Parker asked for bandages to stop the bleeding, he was given copies of his review of their wines.

Bordeaux or Burgundy, still a dick move.

[Rodrigo_B]

Any deconstructed Fruit salad especially involving things rarely encountered or overly specific.

This one get tricky. Just because a fruit is rarely used in TNs doesn’t mean that it can’t be a valid descriptor. Miguel de Leon talked about this in an article he penned last year for PUNCH, talking about his experiences as an Asian sommelier attending tastings and trying to describe wines with descriptors that were familiar to him, and yet foreign to many who use most traditional tasting grids.

I agree with the core of what you’re saying, that often people throw a word jumble of fruit descriptors out there or use obscure descriptors when they really aren’t familiar with them at all. It’s mostly posturing. But just because something is seldom used as a descriptor, doesn’t mean it can’t be an apt descriptor in a tasting and we should be careful to not immediately dismiss those.

I think part of what I’m getting at is that wines evolve. So those ultra specific descriptors may not help me in four or five years.

Here’s a question for us all… how old is wine in the typical tasting note that we read?

What I’m looking for in tasting notes is broad indication of style and quality against expectations for the type of wine, and an indication of how it will evolve.

That’s a separate issue then. You’re more getting at how useful (or not) some tasting notes are if you’re reading them 4-5 years later. It’s why I pay close attention to the date of the notes when looking at notes on CellarTracker. If the lastest note is describing flavour of a young wine, but it was posted 10 years ago, then it’s unlikely that it will taste as it was described. But that’s not really the authors fault though. It’s tough to write a tasting note, describing what the wine will taste like or how the wine will evolve going forward. One can note things like structure, acidity, tannins (if red), their opinion on a wine’s drinking window, etc. as indicators for future onlookers as to how well a wine may age going forward. Ultimately though, a tasting note is a glimpse in time; what a wine tasted like in the moment the author wrote the tasting note.

[J_Rock]

One worded reviews or reviews that you can’t decipher if the wine was liked/disliked

BOOM!

[Otto_Forsberg]

Any deconstructed Fruit salad especially involving things rarely encountered or overly specific.

This one get tricky. Just because a fruit is rarely used in TNs doesn’t mean that it can’t be a valid descriptor. Miguel de Leon talked about this in an article he penned last year for PUNCH, talking about his experiences as an Asian sommelier attending tastings and trying to describe wines with descriptors that were familiar to him, and yet foreign to many who use most traditional tasting grids.

I agree with the core of what you’re saying, that often people throw a word jumble of fruit descriptors out there or use obscure descriptors when they really aren’t familiar with them at all. It’s mostly posturing. But just because something is seldom used as a descriptor, doesn’t mean it can’t be an apt descriptor in a tasting and we should be careful to not immediately dismiss those.

+1

I’ve had several people comment in CT how prepostrous my TNs sound when I throw terms like lingonberries, bilberries and crowberries everywhere.

Come on, I eat those kinds of berries virtually every single time I go walk in a forest late in the summer or in autumn - they are simply everywhere around here. I can understand if somebody is not familiar with them, but they really help me describe the wines best if the primary mental image that a wine brings to my mind is one of those berries. After all, I’m writing primarily the notes for myself, and I find it quite impossible to use some terms one often sees in American tasting notes because we don’t have those kind of aromatic / flavor elements here. For example I have no idea what I should taste when a TN says ‘huckleberry’. And I guess ‘grapey’ can mean quite different things to people who primarily eat hybrid grapes and drink juice made out of hybrids vs. people in the EU (as we don’t grow any hybrids here and all table/juice grapes are vinifera around here).

[Mark_Y]

IG influencer wannabes with “this red wine has no sulphites and is good for you”.

[C_Heinsen]

Alluvial fan.

Apparently a massive discovery has been made over the past couple years where all great wines are above or near an alluvial fan…

[dougwilder]

These are great! Thanks. How about visual cliches? The ones showing up everywhere now are bud break and mustard bloom. How many do you you need to see before it becomes noise? Additionally will anyone notice if it turns out those images are recycled from 5 years ago? Another that I think I’ve seen too much of (and apologies to Jay Hack) is pretending to guzzling a whole bottle. Still clever after seeing people posing that way 50 times? Not really, but it looks great on Jay.

As a photographer of people in the wine business I try to create images that are the antithesis of all the overworked cliches I’ve seen. I was shooting in a Russian River Vineyard last week and the winemaker asked if he should hold a bottle. I told him not to touch it and go over and stand in front of that pretty mustard.