Wine begins as a sensory experience, but investigation begins with discipline. Before looking for a cause, record what is in the glass: color intensity, aroma families, structure, and persistence. This keeps the label’s story from dictating what you expect to perceive.
Three layers
- Observation: “high acidity” or “red-fruit aroma.”
- Interpretation: “the fruit seems fresh rather than cooked.”
- Hypothesis: “ripening may have taken place under relatively cool conditions.”
A hypothesis does not travel backward and become an observation. Two regions can produce similar signals through different paths; two people can also describe the same sensation with different vocabularies.
A notebook that remains accountable
Record serving temperature, time since opening, and tasting context. Compare wines side by side when you want to isolate a variable. In this atlas, every link between a factor and a sensory outcome displays its evidence grade: a plausible explanation does not get dressed up as an established fact.
Continue at the source
The OIV’s Compendium of International Methods of Wine and Must Analysis is the institutional reference for analytical methods. Sensory analysis does not replace those methods; it answers a different question.