The idea of perceiving wine as shapes is not a new one.  What is new is capturing the shapes in wine through the microscope. 72OpusOne2005.35

 

British wine writer and critic, Pat Simon, former wine consultant to the World Bank, UN Food and Agriculture Agency, and Master of Wine for 40 years, wrote in Wine Tasters’ Logic that he made mental images of a wine, formulating shapes as he learned. His lexicon of shapes was useful to follow how the wine’s shape changed at each stage of development. At wine tastings he also noted that some people scribbled images, not words. He performed one published experiment with his series of images. Though Harper’s Wine and Spirit Gazette, which published his study, poked fun at it, tasters reported that the shapes were useful to them. I include his seven shapes here to give you more imagery to consider as visual language or cues for your wine experience.

 Pat Simon's wine shapes

72OpusOne2001.22What is interesting about Simon’s intuited shapes – some are similar to what we see in wine under the peering eye of the microscope.  Do you experience wine in shapes?  Words?  Senses only?