Thoughts on note taking and wine writing
Tasting notes can be the factual reconstruction of objective analysis (given the limitations of objectivity), or they can rise above that and seek to capture the spirit of the wine, and the spirit of the taster while tasting the wine. I am talking about wines that make us want to improve our ability to communicate our love for them, so that we can honestly and thrillingly convey all the impressions we receive and reveal how the experience “improves” us. Such poetic epiphanies are admittedly unlikely to arise from the consumption of a 4.99 Pinot Grigio. The wine has to speak to the taster, there must be something of nature in it, a quality that elevates it above the commercial quotidian.
It certainly helps to be able to mobilise words and cut through the mess of language to the truth. The collaboration between the responsive imagination and mature evaluation is articulated by Wordsworth in his Preface to the Lyrical Ballads where he describes poetry as “emotion recollected in tranquillity”. Applying this to wine tasting we can say that the experience itself triggers a transcendent moment, an instance of the sublime. (I am thinking of tasting wine as a transforming experience, one that takes us to another place). The senses are overwhelmed by this experience; the “spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings” leaves an individual incapable of articulating the true nature and beauty of the sensations. It is only when this emotion is “recollected in tranquillity” that the poet/writer can assemble words to do the moment justice. It is necessary for the poet/writer to have a certain personal distance from the event or experience being described that he or she can compose a poem/tasting note that conveys to the reader the same experience of sublimity. With this distance the poet can reconstruct the “spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings” the experience caused within himself.
I am interpreting the writing of a tasting note as inspirational, creative activity, akin to poetry. One might very well ask who has the time, energy or inclination for these kinds of refinements. After all, I don’t suppose we drink wine in order to perfect our writing style, but if we wish for our experiences to live again we need to realise their aesthetic potential.
If life is a journey where we are searching for some ineluctable truth then the recreation of beauty, which helps us momentarily to stand outside Time, is a magnificent undertaking.
Nabokov describes this sense of excitement nicely:
“Treading the soil of the moon, palpitating its pebbles, tasting the panic and splendour of the event, feeling in the pit of one’s stomach the separation from terra - these form the most romantic sensation an explorer has ever known.”
When I write tasting notes in a rush I might as well be filling it tax forms or ticking boxes. My writing denatures the wine, dissipates the romance.
Often I hanker after a kinaesthesia that would enable my tasting impressions to be instantly transformed into music, something purer, more fluid and more spiritual than words. Although I am dimly aware there is a underlying melody I haven’t got the musical vocabulary and notation skills so rather than tabulating it thus I try to leave myself open to sensations and jot down reactions in any order, recording the relevant - and seemingly irrelevant words - that nudge into my head. Not linking them, not forcing them into sequential order, but simply allowing them to be signposts that will guide me back when I review them later.
At best wine can be a symphonic poem. The oak and varietal character are played by base instruments, the fruit by wood or reed (flutes, oboes, bassoons) whilst the minerality is provided by the strings. Help my metaphor, it’s drowning!
I wonder at tasters who can churn robotically through a hundred or so wines at a time. Such a procedure has little individual investment; one is reminded of a basking shark filter-feeding millions of plankton – it doesn’t taste anything during its meal-journey.
Sitting on tasting panels doesn’t add to the gaiety of my personal nation; invariably I end up disillusioned, feeling that wine is a mere commodity, existing to be judged rather than understood. In real life, so to speak, I drink wine with friends and as an accompaniment to food. And if a bottle knocks me on my ass, as we say at Les Caves de Pyrene, I will simply scribble down a few words at the time to remind me to write a tasting note at a later date. And looking at those words will enable me to retrieve the experience; of course, its original immediacy will be mediated by my ego, it will filtered through time, and ultimately coarsened by the imprecision of language . The excitement of tasting and drinking can never be truly recaptured – it is the intoxicating Dionysian moment reconfigured within a unifying Apollonian response.
Beauty comes in myriad forms; great wines can evoke great reactions and poetic impulses, they make us explore beyond the limits of our normal responses, they induce humility and elicit generosity. When tasting it is satisfying to have a responsive palate; it is wonderful though to take the experience to the next level and give something back.