Forget numbers—you need words to really rate a wine. But how many words? Andrew Barrow, who blogs at Spittoon, challenged wine-lovers to describe an Italian red wine in just seven words. The results are often poetic and evocative:
‘Chewed end of a wooden ink pen.’
…
‘[L]ike your mother-in-law; spicy, tart and sweet.’
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‘Leather clad cowboy embraces innocent luscious berries.’
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‘Faded Violet Around an Ancient Fruity Abbey.’
Forget “drink with chicken”—if I saw descriptions like these on a wine store shelf, they’d entice me to buy a bottle. Some of them are almost as good as Lane Steinberg’s red wine haiku reviews.
I love it (although I think mother-in-law should be counted as three words), let’s toss out the scoring system and review wines this way.
yes, definitely, i’ll play. standard reviews are useless and vaguely insulting. however, i strongly favor the reviews in haiku form. (let me add here that the haiku in lane steinberg’s column do not fall within traditional haiku parameters. although he adhere’s to the 5-7-5 constraint — he very cavalierly dismisses the equally important traditional constraint that each line must stand alone as a complete thought.