Tuesday, October 12, 2004

A Tasting Note Is A Tasting Note Is A Tasting Note Is A....
The following is a tasting note for a wine. I'm not going to say which wine. If you need that information it is here. What I want to know is whether you find validity in this prose as a description of fine wine?

"I hadn’t known this was coming. How do you get higher than the summit? Stand on tippy-toes. Now comes the salt to shimmy into the sweetness and glide in an itchy, urgent gorgeousness over the palate. Profound, magnificent without opacity, rather delineated to the last molecule of detail. It tastes this way for the same reason blossoms open— for the bees to be useful, for the plant to live and make new plants, for a few human passersby to pause, sniff, delight, and feel a strange longing, almost sad, wanting to touch another warm skin, oddly happy and alone in the odd lonely world".

I have no problem with the expression of emotion in a tasting note. The tasting of wine, like many experiences in life, can evoke emotion and recording that in written form is laudatory. However the tasting note provided is just that, an emotional reflection. Without the wine identifier as title there is no other information and so it is unclear what the emotion is directed toward. It could be sex, possibly food, almost any experience. As a personal reflection it serves the writer well, may even recall the experience at a later date but it is unlikely to do well as a means of sharing the experience with others who have not directly shared that experience. It is the ability to share the experience that I seek from a well written tasting note . To some extent this is why descriptive personal notes that also provide analytical detail are much more successfull than either purely emotional, or purely analytical matter of fact descriptions.

No comments: