I mean, I kind of get what he’s trying to say here, but I still threw up a little reading those words.
What do you think he’s trying to express with those words, Tim? I have a hard time imagining what a paraphrase would be.
This wine shows verticality and it’s a pleasure bomb. Does that imply explosive verticality?
Trediberri Barolo Berri 2020 (750ml)
96VM
Nicola and Stefania Oberto may very well put Berri on the map with their 2020 Barolo Berri. What a wine. Deep, soaring and wonderfully expressive, the 2020 is stunning in its beauty. Dark red/purplish fruit, orange peel, cinnamon, rose petal and lavender are all amplified in a vertical, soaring Barolo of magnificent intensity. Silky, polished tannins round things out in style. The 2020 is pure and sensual to the core - a total pleasure bomb.
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Please excuse my ignorance, but could someone explain to me what verticality is and why it’s a good thing? What would horizontality be would it be a bad thing or just less good? Could a wine have neither of these things? Would this be pointality and would it be good, bad or indifferent?
Your yearly stab at trying to get to the bottom of this? 
You are right. I had asked more or less this exact question. But I didn’t get an answer that time. Maybe I’ll have better luck this time. In my defense, I posed the question in the context of the exact same discussion.
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This is the poetry she wrote in high school. Look, I suppose there has to be some room for poetic license in writing these notes. If you have to write thousands of them every year, there is only so much room for vocabulary. However a technical/objective analysis of tannin, concentration, acidity, ripeness of fruit and general fruit spectrum would be welcome in some sort of organized presentation. I doubt this was the kind of stuff that got her a MW. Cast iron pan does seem a tad beyond the pale, I have a lovely cast iron Griswold that will certainly outlive me but i doubt I would want to drink it.
Look the lady is trying to make a living, and perhaps in a more, dare I say it in these progressive times, feminine way? I just think of her now as a female version of James Suckling. I hope she gets her home in Tuscany someday. 
Well, bombs do blow up….
Methinks she deserves a house in Tuscany more than Suckling. I’ve had a go at her writing style on occasion but your point is well made — how easy is it to communicate enthusiasm and also be critical without being repetitive or boring? My tastes don’t align all that well with hers but at least with LPB I do get some sense of what the wine, er, brings to the table and whether I really want to try it or not. And I really can’t say that with Suckling — it’s not a matter of his 98-100 point scale, I don’t care what the number is, it’s that I don’t really trust the descriptors. With LPB I mostly do. Yes, I trust William Kelley or Kerin O’Keefe or even Claude Kolm more, but that’s not the point: are her notes useful to me? Yes they are.
Presumably verticality would be like “depth” and horizontally would be like “length,” both of which are old and presumably accepted tasting terms.
Well, because people can change words in the way they want, and the reviewers are clearly not using these words anything like precisely, perhaps they do mean that. But it isn’t what the words mean. Vertical is just up and down, there is nothing about depth implied about the down part. Certainly not depth as profundity. Likewise, horizontal is just back and forth and implies nothing about length, A line one inch long on the plane would still be horizontal. If these are common wine tasting terms for length and depth, I’ll accept that I just didn’t know that. But the discussion here, twice over in two years, indicates not.
Hi John – Thanks for flagging this note—made me LOL. I read this thread a lot, specifically to understand better what resonates with tasting note readers, including terms that are meaningful, and those that are confusing or off-putting. I’ve stopped using “cast iron pan” thanks to this thread, realizing that my experience of this smell is not the same as that of others. And no more “Black Forest Cake” for me, although, as you’ve called out, I occasionally sneak chocolate and black cherries into the same note. (Old habits…) Because of my background (MW – now a Paper Chair for the exam, ex trade wine buyer, etc.), I’m a technical taster, but I don’t want my tasting notes to come off too dry. It’s not an exercise in wine poetry, but apart from the important technical details, I try very hard to capture the experience of tasting the wine—the wine’s personality. I’ll confess, this 2016 Ch Margaux note is a little OTT, but as you can see, I found the wine very showy and graceful. If you take this note apart, though, it should give you a clear indication of the style of the wine. It’s very young (deep/purple-colored, primary fruit notes) with floral and savory accents (not a fruit bomb). The palate is intense and layered, yet solidly structured with a high level of soft, ripe tannins. A critical style indicator is the body, and the widespread misuse of this term is nails down a chalkboard for me. Some critics never even mention body; others seem to have no idea what it means and judge it randomly. I always judge body in my notes across five different levels (light, light to medium, medium, medium to full, and full). Therefore, even if the alcohol isn’t known or mentioned in the note (and labels are seldom completely honest about ABV), the body mentioned in my tasting notes should give you a rough idea of this since one of the major components of body in a dry wine is alcohol (the 2016 Ch Margaux is around 13.5%). Anyway, cheers for reminding me to keep it real!
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“Presumably”?
I assumed that “verticality” was a way of suggesting that the wine has some brightness, freshness, some acidity – quite different from depth.
The fact that you and I take this to mean such different things just illustrates the point that a lot of these terms have no generally accepted meaning.
I can see how you might read “horizontal” as meaning length, but does anyone actually use that term? I don’t recall encountering it. Someone might also think that it implies that the wine just lies there, like a drunk who’s done a face plant.
Lisa - Thanks for taking the teasing so gracefully, as you have in the past.
I agree with that completely – particularly the part about conveying the style and body. That’s something I think Bob Parker did extremely well. Even after my palate diverged from his, I could usually tell from his notes the style and structure of the wine – I could tell that his 95 pointer might not be my kind of wine. That made his notes valuable.
I also find it very useful for some wines to know how conspicuous any new oak is. You expect that in a Rioja, but in some it can be overpowering. And some people are particular averse to strong American oak, while others love it. In nebbiolo and Northern Rhone, new oak seems to have a way of reducing the detail of the wine even with age – glossing it over. So noting the oak can be highly relevant to many sophisticated consumers. I’m always amazed when I read reviews of wines that are super oaky where the notes make no mention of that. (To me, oak aromas in Bordeaux and serious Burgundy are normal and not a problem.)
A few further thoughts of my own:
- Conveying “the experience” of the wine is great if you can pull it off. But it’s got to be an enormous challenge if you’re discussing a dozen, or 20 or 30 wines of one type. How do you differentiate them? Some people have a gift for this (Kermit Lynch comes to mind). Sometimes poetry and metaphors can achieve that end. (I like the metaphor I just came up with: “The wine just lies there like a drunk who’s done a face plant.”) But it’s all too easy for this kind of language to be over the top, cliche and comic.
- Whether you go that route or something more analytic (MW-ish?) will depend on the audience, too. Are you writing to a bunch of Berserker wine geeks who want info without a lot of lace, or are you aiming to convey enthusiasm to a much wider audience who just enjoy wine but aren’t obsessive about it. The style should suit the audience. For me, it’s often helpful to compare a wine to another vintage, or another property. That gives me a frame of reference better than a bunch of superlatives or a catalog of smells. But that won’t help people with more limited tasting histories.
- We have a plague of flavor and aroma adjectives in tasting notes. These are the most subjective terms and least helpful. I laugh when a retailer sends me an email with three critics’ notes on the same wine and there is no correlation in the descriptors – none, or maybe there is one shared word among 15 in each note. Again, Parker managed to do a good job without loading up on obscure fruits or distinctions between the aromas of different woods when they are burned (or merely singed).
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Wow! Props to @LisaPB for showing up in this thread (and contributing a very thoughtful description of how she uses terms like ‘body’ in her notes). Speaks very well of her if she can absorb something useful from a thread that has at times made quite a bit of fun of characteristics of her writing style.
I think wine critics job in writing prose descriptions of dozens to hundreds of rather similar wines is almost impossible to do without developing stylistic tics and repetitions (I certainly couldn’t manage it). But there’s an implicit criticism in this thread about how the combination of routinely astronomical scores and extravagant descriptive language has made it quite difficult to actually translate critical write ups into a reliable indication of the character of the wine. That’s a useful thing for critics to consider
P.s I’ll admit to some satisfaction at the retirement of “Black Forest cake” 
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Thanks, John—this is all very useful feedback! I agree with your point about oak, which can be a polarizing style-changer. It’s one thing to provide technical details about the type of oak, how much new oak is used, and how long the wine is aged in it. However, the perception of oak is more important. If you pick up oak flavors/tannins and it’s not well-knit into the wine, mentioning this is far more useful than piling on more fruit descriptors.
I totally agree.
Lisa, really classy post, and cheers to you for playing in this sandbox and joining the fray with good humor. Respect.
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Thanks! I love reading this thread, so keep 'em coming.
+1 on the fruit salad problem. Also the far-fetched adjectives or adjectival phrases that I wonder if the writer, or for that matter anyone, has ever actually smelled or tasted.