Talk:Wine tasting descriptors

Links to this article

To make this article more functional in being linked to at relevant points in other articles I've created a series of redirect based on the "sub topic" entries in this article with (wine) as a disambiguation point. So if you were writing a powerful wine you could link to this page with [[powerful (wine)|]], etc. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Agne27 (talk • contribs) 13:55, 31 October 2007 (UTC)

Additional terms

In the article Stony Hill Vineyard the term "non-malolactic" is used. Could you consider adding a related term to this list so that its meaning can be obtained by cross-reference to this article? Thank you. --User:Ceyockey (talk to me) 12:19, 29 November 2007 (UTC)

Further terms

I've been saving this from the March 2005 Wine Spectator Advance: "Terrific nose of freshly crushed plum and blueberry, followed by an authortative palate of fig, blackberry, tar, espresso and mineral. Muscular back end, with chocolate and loam-flavored tannins driving the finish. Should gain more nuance with cellaring."

I saved this description for the eloquent way it describes the flavor of mud in a parking lot! Authoritative palate of ... tar, ... and mineral, ... with ... loam-flavored tannins....

And some of those terms aren't in this article. I'd love to see them go in, but I have no idea how to describe them. ~Amatulić (talk) 23:55, 14 January 2009 (UTC)

Evidence?

Is there any evidence that people can and do actually make these distinctions consistently? Or is it just snob vocabulary, with no real anchoring in fact? 121a0012 (talk) 03:34, 20 November 2011 (UTC)

Many of the terms are objective; anyone who has tasted wine even casually over a couple of years could discern them. Even for my own inexperienced palate, examples I can experience objectively would be "balanced" (neither acidity nor sweetness nor frutiness nor tannins or other flavors dominate), "hot" (too much alcohol in comparison to other flavors gives a burning sensation), flabby (low acidity; you can tell when you taste it), "big" (powerful flavors compared to most other wines), "tannin" or "tannic" (leaves your tongue feeling dry, like fur has grown on it), "oaky" (try tasting the same wine fermented in oak barrels versus steel containers and it's so obvious you'll recognize it forever), and so on.

That said, many other terms are subjective. They may be discernible to professionals who make their living in the wine industry. I don't think it has anything to do with snobbishness, since one must come up with ways to describe flavors. But it is true that winemakers and wine sellers will try to come up with the most flowery and fanciful descriptors they can for promotional purposes.

I'm disturbed that a citation I thought was in this article isn't. Maybe it's in another article, and now I'll be bothered until I find it. It was an academic journal article about reconciling all the tasting terms used by famous wine tasters like Robert Parker and others. I recall the article contained information about the subjectivity of this vocabulary, too. ~Amatulić (talk) 04:49, 20 November 2011 (UTC)

Ah, I found it, it's in the wine tasting article, not this one. See references 4 and 5. URL to the article is here: http://web.archive.org/web/20070928231853/http://www.academie-amorim.com/us/laureat_2001/brochet.pdf ~Amatulić (talk) 06:01, 20 November 2011 (UTC)