VINPRESSION® VISUAL TASTING NOTES BY JORDAN FIORENTINI
There are three essential components to wine tasting: flavor, aroma, and texture. While we are accustomed to describing wines in terms of their flavors and aromas, texture is challenging to articulate in words yet absolutely essential to understanding the essence of a wine. Texture is what gives wine its complexity and dimension; it is a window into the winemaker’s decisions in the vineyard and winery, and it is what I am highly focused on when I grow, make, and taste wine. Learning how to communicate the overall textural experience of wine to the consumer has been a challenge and a goal over my career as a winemaker. When I taste a wine, I sense its texture as shapes that move across my palate following the flow of the wine from the front to the back of the mouth. For more than a decade now, I have drawn these shapes in graphical form to create a wine’s visual tasting notes. I call them VINPRESSION® visual tasting notes.
Each VINPRESSION® I create is a unique piece of art, drawn on a four-quadrant graph that describes the textural sensations on the front, mid, and back palate. If a line drops to the bottom of the page, it signifies that the wine is hitting the bottom of my palate. Conversely, if a line reaches the top quadrant, it means the wine touches the top of my palate. In my VINPRESSION® drawings, I use circular forms to convey a wine’s soft and lush texture, while tannins show up as angular or pointed lines. Acidity directs the wine’s sensation high on the palate and interacts with tannins to accentuate a wine’s finishing texture on the upper-back palate, folding forward towards the upper-front palate. A holistic focus on the flavors, aromas, and textures allows us to better connect with individual wines in a personal and memorable way. I hope that my VINPRESSION® drawings will serve as a tool to better understand, appreciate, and remember wines that you taste and inspire you to draw your own tasting notes in the future.
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