That Wine was What Color?

A wine aficionado doesn’t just sit and enjoy a glass of wine, they ask themselves questions.

That wine is what color?

What aroma is that?

What the heck is that flavor?

These are all questions that a wine enthusiast poses when they sip a glass of wine. It is no secret that Mike and I love wine.  It’s also no secret that Mike and I believe that you shouldn’t let anyone tell you what wine to drink or dictate the flavors you should taste in a wine. I have written posts about the science of tasting and the ridiculousness of purchasing a wine simply because someone else has given it a high rating. In no means am I putting down my fellow bloggers for scoring wines in their blogs.  That is not what I’m saying.  I think reading other people’s opinions of wine is a great educational tool.  My lesson is “Don’t let their scores influence your opinion of what YOU taste and enjoy.”  The problem is that your palate is not theirs.  

For example, there is a well known wine critic [He Who Must Not Be Named] who has a huge following and is thought to be the “end all be all” of palates. In that lies the problem. Although Mike’s and my palates are similar, neither of ours aligns with this Dark Lord’s palate. Please don’t get brainwashed into thinking that if you don’t taste or like what he says [or anyone else says], there must be something wrong with you.  This brings me back to my fellow bloggers and their rating systems. If you are looking for advice, they are there for you.  Read their posts, choose a wine that they recommend and taste it. But [bctt tweet=”when you are tasting the wine, be honest with yourself and decide if you like it or not.”] Over time, by tasting wines recommended by others, you will find a blogger or two or three whose palate does align with yours.  Now you can use their scoring system to help you make educated decisions.

With that rant out of my system, I can get into what this post is really about.  The color of wine.  Mike and I enjoy using Delectable. It is a wine app that instantly recognizes any wine from a photo so you can learn about what you’re drinking, get expert recommendations, and have your favorites delivered to your door. We enjoy sitting down with a glass of wine and dissecting it then enjoying it.  The app is very straight forward. You take a picture of the label, and somehow [way beyond my technical know how] it recognizes the wine and brings up everyone’s ratings on the wine.  You can then choose to add your rating and tasting notes.  We use it to keep track of when we tasted a certain wine and to record what we thought of the wine. Interestingly, just as your palate is different from anyone else’s, your own palate can change on a given day.  We have tasted a wine one day and a month or two later have the same wine, yet rate it differently. As with every other social app out there, you can follow people and chat with them.  If you are interested in seeing our tasting notes and/or following us, you can find our profile here. 

When writing our tasting notes, I follow the same format for each wine.

Pours ______ in color. Aromas of ________. Flavors include ________.  _____ bodied with a ______ finish.

If there is anything else I feel is necessary I add it at the end. Maybe we found some faults, or maybe it should be decanted for a certain time.  Things that will help us [or someone else] the next time we drink this particular wine.  The problem I noticed we had very early on was that [bctt tweet=”wine color is very subjective.”]  For example, what I considered “ruby” was not the same that Mike envisioned as “ruby.” This posed a problem. So luckily Google came to the rescue.  I started researching colors and found two charts [one for reds and one for whites] that we now use each time we “Delectable” a wine. 

Thanks to DigitalSynopsis.com, and writer/children’s book illustrator Ingrid Sundberg for creating a Color Thesaurus. In reality, these charts were meant for artists, but it has created a reference for us and these are the colors we use when we are writing about a wine.  It allows us to be consistent from wine to wine. If you are familiar with wine colors, you will no doubt be saying, these are not “wine colors” and to that I say, “Yep”, but I’ve never been one to color within the lines.  I wanted a standard to compare to with each glass and this works perfectly.

So now instead of debating “That Wine is What Color?” I open the photos on my iPhone/iPad and pull up either of these charts and compare. Blonde or Ruby today will be Blonde or Ruby tomorrow and a year from now. And anyone who reads our tasting notes will know exactly what we are describing as it pours out of the bottle into the glass anxiously awaiting to be sipped and enjoyed. 

Please leave a comment to describe what you do to make sure you are being consistent when recording your tasting notes.  

~Sláinte!