If wine had an image to represent its character, style or personality – what kind of wine do you think would be represented by the above image?
I often fantasize that if wine bottles had pictures of what’s inside the bottle, we the consumer might make different choices.
Granted our experience of wine is subjective yet in my own experience capturing wine’s expression under the microscope I do see recurrent photographic themes. Most sauvignon blancs (like the above) show more linear and angular simple shapes, while chardonnays with malolactic fermentation reveal bigger more rounded shapes
Karen Macneil in The Wine Bible says that sauvignon blanc is lean like Jamie Lee Curtis and chardonnay is voluptuous like Marilyn Monroe. This portrait is of the big bodied Beringer chardonnay.
You can read more in Wine’s Hidden Beauty, first edition still available.
The top image is a sauvignon blanc from Sterling Vineyards. Here is another lean and lithe sauvignon blanc – this one from Benziger.
What would expect a wine with this image to be like?
And what about this one, I will call it wine B
