I’m relatively new to the world of wine, having started collecting only about a year ago. I’m trying to get some solid experience with matching intellectual descriptions of wine with the actual taste associations, and I thought it might be interesting to see what the collective depth of experience on this board can contribute.
What I’d like to do is throw out a handful of common descriptors, and see what responses we get back in terms of the purest example of this descriptor. In other words, if you were to recommend a bottle that gives the purest, most prototypical example of that feature – what would it be? Feel free to be as specific as possible (producer, varietal, vintage), and only based on wines you have personally tasted. Clearly these words are all used commonly in tasting notes, and often in combination with each other. But I am interested in a single bottle that shows off an individual or isolated descriptor in a particularly impressive or memorable way.
Here are some interesting descriptors that I commonly see; what bottle should I buy to experience them at their clearest and most focused?
Tobacco
Fruit bomb
Oak
Smoke
Green pepper
Spicy
Toasty
Cigar box
Hedonistic
Minerality
Velvet
Pencil lead
Tongue coating
Elegant
Jammy
Feminine
Masculine
Get yourself a bottle of 1995 Arrowood Reserve Speciale if you want to taste tobacco done well in harmony with the dark fruit.
Any old Left Bank (Medoc / Pauillac) Bordeaux will do for pencil lead, particularly Lynch Bages.
Different varietals and even different producers have different styles of spice. Zinfandel (black pepper) and Burgundy (cinnamon) have very different spice characteristics.
It’s not always that easy to find. James at Old & Rare Wine, Benchmark Wine Group (Madeline is enthusiastic), and either Ben at CellaRaiders comes across a bottle. Once to twice a year you’ll see odd lots of 1 to 3 bottles available. Fair warning… some of us like it a LOT:
I happen to know a guy who has 5 more bottles though. He would want to know whatcha got in trade?
The 1993 has a touch more menthol / eucalyptus, tobacco, and spice. Not so much it overpowers the fruit, but enough that you wouldn’t exactly call them subtle secondary notes.
The 2001 has much more fruit to it. It like somebody dialed up the fruit from a 6 to an 8, and dialed down the secondary characteristics from a 6 to a 3. Probably my favorite Cali Cab.
I look at TNs for structural notes, and for indications of primary vs secondary vs tertiary flavors. And a teeny bit for indications of red fruit vs black fruit or some such. And indications of any flaws or obtrusive oak.
But I so can’t recall the last time I cared about cherry vs strawberry in wine note, much less some particular kind of cherry.
Lay out several small glasses with a different herb, fruit (muddled, slightly heated, fresh and sliced), etc, in each separate glass. Have your tasting group taste different wines and compare them to the reference glasses, along with an aroma wheel? Every person takes silent notes on paper, and y’all compare opinions at the end?
And it doesn’t matter if they’re written by “professionals” or by amateurs.
In addition, some people throw around descriptions that they don’t understand. I’ve had wine with people and they talk about some “reductive green pepper notes”, which leaves me wondering, and I’ve heard others talk about reduction as if it’s concentration. And others talk about cassis that they’ve never had.
Not everyone, to be sure, but then also remember that people have different tolerance levels and perception levels. Right now I’m drinking a Montelena Cab Franc and it has a kind of tomato quality to it, as well as a vegetal note, but not the green like CF from Chinon and it doesn’t have the red cherry that some do from Washington. So in my head I can distinguish it but good luck finding anything of use to you.
Depending on how deeply you want to go, you could consider purchasing one of these (I’ve found the master kit very helpful). http://www.winearomas.com/
The descriptors are fine. How people apply them to a particular wine is problematic.
Some are pretty straight forward like pepper or tobacco. Most can pick those things out. Where folks lose me is with fruit notes. Blackberry versus black raspberry vs huckleberry vs black cherry, etc. I use those just to set a baseline of is it a dark fruit vs red fruit wine. Anything more than that is BS IMHO.
I disagree here. While I’m focusing as well mostly on structure and evolution, how can you separate out the distinct notes that arise from the glass? I’m guessing if we pull up everyone’s notes, we will see specific descriptors somewhere. I do not really care for strawberry, but really like black cherry, so that distinction is notable to me. There are some wines where tobacco, olives, bell pepper, etc., are so prominent, that how can you not note it? I do agree with Keith that I don’t go into a wine thinking about descriptors, but I certainly come out of it with thoughts in mind.
I’m with Alfert here as far as distinct notes being inseparable from the experience. If a wine has too much bell pepper or green herbal notes it turns me off. While I’ve learned to tolerate and even sometimes enjoy a hint of graphite, once that odor hits pencil shavings a wine moves into the intolerable category.
I’m a fan of signature wines, wines that are distinctive, and sometimes those wines are distinctive mostly because of a single note. Levet, Sociando, Togni, Juge, etc. Yea theses recompiled, too, but they each have a signature that jumps out beyond what you generally see in their respective class. Popped a Metras last night, that’s what I want, a wine of distinction - my wife called it “foul,” which is rather descriptive. Gracefully I got the whole bottle to myself.
Any time I’ve compared professional tasting notes of the same wine, the pros often agree on the wine’s ultimate quality (or score) but virtually never on the descriptors: Tanzer’s cherry might be Parker’s raspberry.
And polished mahogany furniture? Cassis leaf (raise your hands if you’ve ever seen an actual blackcurrant plant let alone smelled the leaves)? Fanciful is the best you can say about such descriptors, IMO.
Robert, I don’t find utility in differentiating between someone saying bell pepper and them saying herbal, because that difference is so subjective. What does have value to me, is the note mentioning a green character. In my own notes, that difference is more valid but still quite subject to the vagaries of the human perceptual system.
Or maybe there’s a cultural component involved. Blackcurrants are very common in Britain and Ireland, both fresh and made into jams, etc. I picked them often as a child so this descriptor does have resonance for me.
Yes, in particular, don’t ascribe any meaning to “minerality,” which once had a meaning but has been utterly debased and applied to every conceivable wine from Muscadet to monster California pinots.
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He would want to know whatcha got in trade? ![[cheers.gif]](/uploads/db3686/original/2X/0/0ff9bfcdb0964982cd3240b6159868fbdf215b1a.gif "cheers"){kind=small}