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As my close friends know painfully well, I\u2019m not exactly good at making decisions. At the wine store, I\u2019m the customer who gets asked \u201cCan I help you?\u201d twice by the same salesperson because I\u2019ve meandered between shelves for so long that they have forgotten our first encounter.<\/p>\n
Then I usually say something brilliant like, \u201cCan you help me find a red wine that tastes\u2026you know, tasty\u2026um, like the one I bought a few weeks ago\u2026I think it was French\u2026?\u201d<\/p>\n
It\u2019s not that I\u2019m a complete oeno-idiot. I know most of the major regions and varietals, and my palate can be downright picky (especially at parties, when it\u2019s easy to surreptitiously abandon one\u2019s glass after an unpleasant sip or two). But there seems to be a sensory-linguistic connection missing in my brain when it comes to describing delicious wine.<\/p>\n
Fortunately, I just stumbled across a cool tool called the Vinogram (www.vinobilia.com\/wines.en.html;vinograms). In the build-your-own version, it asks a series of questions about your taste in other areas, then uses those concrete examples to predict which wine characteristics (i.e. aged, floral, fruity, mineral) you will probably like more than others.<\/p>\n
For example, do you prefer mild or strong cheese? (Strong.) White or dark chocolate? (Dark.) Would you rather smell \u201cwood pitch and gasoline,\u201d \u201choney and hay,\u201d \u201cnutty and dry apricot,\u201d or \u201ccitrus and white flower\u201d? (Anything but the first, please!) And so on. In most cases, it seems obvious where your answers will lead you,* but it\u2019s still fun to see the results in graphic form.<\/p>\n
Armed with this knowledge on my next shopping endeavor, I will seek out a \u201cpowerful, persistent, toasty\u201d red with moderately floral, fruity and spicy notes and just a hint of sweetness. The Vinogram thinks I might like to try a Vin de Pays (\u201dcountry wine\u201d) from Languedoc, or a Merlot from Saint Emilion, among others. Of course, I\u2019ll read the label carefully.<\/p>\n
Between that and the helpful \u201cWine and Food Matcher\u201d I found over at Natalie MacLean\u2019s site, I may never befuddle a wine salesperson again.<\/p>\n
*Except for this question: When shopping for Christmas presents, do you tend to buy far in advance or wait until the last minute? Unless \u201cprocrastination\u201d is actually a wine characteristic, this is probably a marketing question that snuck in there.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
As my close friends know painfully well, I\u2019m not exactly good at making decisions. At the wine store, I\u2019m the customer who gets asked \u201cCan I help you?\u201d twice by the same salesperson because I\u2019ve meandered between shelves for so long that they have forgotten our first encounter. Then I usually say something brilliant like, \u201cCan you help me find a red wine that tastes\u2026you know, tasty\u2026um, like the one I bought a few weeks ago\u2026I think it was French\u2026?\u201d It\u2019s not that I\u2019m a complete oeno-idiot. I know most of the major regions and varietals, and my palate can […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-651","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-taste-wine"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nataliemaclean.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/651","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nataliemaclean.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nataliemaclean.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nataliemaclean.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nataliemaclean.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=651"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.nataliemaclean.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/651\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nataliemaclean.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=651"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nataliemaclean.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=651"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nataliemaclean.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=651"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}