Appreciating Wine: The Taste Experience
Posted By Joel on August 19, 2009
“The Dance”, Henri Matisse
French artist Henri Matisse is famous for compositional concepts that reduce art (read: simplify) to the fundamental components of line and color. His lyrical work “The Dance” nicely expresses the idea.
In the context of appreciating wine, the work of Matisse gave rise to an interesting question for me: What are the axiological elements of wine most fundamental to appreciating the taste experience?
What we evaluate, indeed appreciate about a wine has a lot of moving parts, so to speak: the wine’s appearance, color, aroma, flavor, acidity, balance, tannin, touch, aftertaste, etc.
For me, harmony or Balance among all those components is the trump card criterion in terms of my front line appreciation of a wine.
But there, too, is the incredible intimacy of wine to consider - after all, it is held in the mouth, touching lips and tongue - an intimate energy that is expressed and communicated through sense of touch.
Actually, much of what we ooh and ahh about in wine is quite related to the perception of “touch”.
Balance and Sense of Touch together give dimension to wine and help to inform other impressions I may ultimately have about a particular wine, impressions less accessible to language perhaps, but that nonetheless intuit a sense of soul, an understanding of a wine’s unique identity, it’s totality.
Perhaps you agree? Or what components do you imagine to be most fundamental to your experience appreciating wine?
Your impressions may be different than mine and that’s OK! Would love to hear 
*Photo Credit:
“The Dance” by Henri Matisse borrowed from the BBC, original article here.
About the author
Joel
Joel Mack has worked for a celebrated importer / distributor of Italian wines and continues to study the wines and winemaking of Italy. He has advised many restaurants in making their Italian wine list selections and has provided training to restaurant staff. Today, Joel conducts wine classes and leads specialized private and corporate tastings of Italian wines. Joel carried out his higher education at a highly regarded College of Music and continues to extend an artistic point of view to Italian wine, balanced with factual information about wine, its nature and identity. By day, he applies his time to collaborative software technology. Joel can be contacted at joel@vintrospective.com.Comments
2 Responses to “Appreciating Wine: The Taste Experience”
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They do say that creating outstanding wine is an art. There are so many factors that are involved in tasting wine. I agree that balance is the key.
As a person who does not make wine and has no wine training, I resort to judging the quality of a wine on one simple fact: Do I enjoy drinking this wine?
Hi Steve, Thanks for your comment. It’s a great bottom line you suggest: in the end, its all about one enjoying the wine ! Cheers, and thanks for stopping by Vintrospective
Best, Joel.