Recently I posted an essay on my theory of wine tasting which evaluates wine by how its structure creates movement, texture, and tension over time, connecting those felt dynamics to character and place—rather than listing aroma notes.
That got me thinking about what other theories of wine tasting are out there. I came up with 8 distinct approaches but this is probably not exhaustive. Many wine writers, of course, will deploy more than one.
Two questions organize almost every approach:
Where does value come from? Is it intrinsic (what the liquid is doing in the glass) or extrinsic (about the wine’s story, region, or status)
What exactly are we judging? Is it an event (the tasting as it unfolds, with air, temperature, food, glass) or is it an object, a stable thing that can be scored “as is”.
With that basic orientation in hand, here are the eight main conceptions of wine evaluation you meet in the wild, what they get right, and what they miss.
1) Formalist “BLIC” (Balance, Length, Intensity, Complexity)
What it claims: A quality wine is balanced, long on the finish, sufficiently intense, and complex. Many professional exams and panels run on this approach.
What it gets right: It’s teachable and reproducible. If you put five trained tasters in a room, “length” and “intensity” are easier to calibrate than poetry about minerality.
Where it struggles: BLIC tells you how much (intensity) and how well balanced, but not what it means. Two Pinots can both be “balanced, long, intense, and complex,” yet one is aerial, tense, and ascetic and the other generous, layered, and baroque. BLIC doesn’t give you the language to separate those different expressions or to explain how the wine moves from attack to finish.
BLIC is like evaluating a new song with a metronome and volume meter. That might be useful but doesn’t tell you what the music is doing or what it means.
2) Typicity / Authenticity (AOC/DO logic)
What it claims: Quality equals fidelity to type. What is typical of the variety, the region, and method of production sets the template against which a wine is evaluated: Textbook Chablis, classic Barolo, or authentic Rioja.
What it gets right: It offers cultural continuity and shared expectations. Typicity protects regional character from “international style” flattening.
Where it struggles: It can turn conformity into a value. A wine that reveals site but breaks the regional mold gets penalized. And typicity often says nothing about the wine’s expressive stance (line over mass, austerity over gloss) or its temporal arc with oxygen and age.
Typicity is like the grammar of a language. It matters—but grammar alone doesn’t tell you whether a paragraph sings.
3) Hedonic–Consumerism (scores and price/quality ratio)
What it claims: Quality reduces to how much pleasure you (or a panel average) feel. In practice it’s about: a number—“95!”—plus “great value.”
What it gets right: It’s fast and decisive. You can stock a retail wall using nothing but scores.
Where it struggles: Scores flatten differences inside the same band. Ten “93-point” wines can be wildly different in style and place expression. Hedonic models don’t tell you why you’ll love one and leave the others.
It’s perfect for Tuesday night shopping when you’re in a hurry. Not so go for Wednesday morning thinking.
4) Narrative / Contextualism
What it claims: Meaning comes from people, histories, occasions: who made it, how they farm, old vines, wars survived, dinners shared, etc.
What it gets right: This is why bottles matter in life. Narrative gives wine social and ethical stakes.
Where it struggles: The glass can become a prop for the story. Without an in-glass account of expression, “terroir” becomes a label claim rather than something you can taste.
This is the memoir and travel writing we love but it’s best when it’s tethered to what the liquid is actually doing.
5) Phenomenological Anti-formalism (No notes, no grids, live in the moment)
What it claims: Trust the lived event; rigid frameworks can dull surprise and reduce wines to checklists.
What it gets right: It protects singularity and context. It reminds us that tasting is a living interaction.
Where it struggles: Private epiphanies don’t easily become public reasons. Without shared predicates and some account of what they mean readers can’t test or learn from the encounter.
It’s the wonderful dinner story that you can’t reproduce because you weren’t there, with that air, that light, that friend.
6) Scientific Objectivism (chemometrics, Quantitative Descriptive Analysis)
What it claims: Measure sensory and chemical variables and use metrics to model drivers of liking and of specific flavor notes.
What it gets right: Reliability and diagnostic power, e.g., pyrazines drive green pepper; certain esters drive pear and banana; time-intensity curves tell you how signals rise and fall.
Where it struggles: Science explains drivers of flavor notes, not expression or meaning. It rarely speaks about style (line vs. mass, ascetic vs generous), and the lived time-form (tension, release, legato vs staccato) is hard to capture with panel charts.
Knowing which strings vibrate doesn’t tell you why the musical piece feels elegiac.
9) Authentic-Craft Romanticism
What it claims: Quality tracks a virtuous method—organics/biodynamics, low-intervention cellar, handwork, and heritage.
What it gets right: It integrates ethics and aesthetics and directs money toward better practices.
Where it struggles: It can smuggle in a method = merit fallacy. Farming and cellar ethics matter aesthetically when they shape expression in the glass; they don’t confer quality by themselves.
We rightly care how how a wine was made but what it tastes like matters too.
7) Institutional / Sociological
What it claims: Quality is what critics, buyers, collectors, and competitions ratify. Taste is social currency.
What it gets right: It explains prestige and price, why fashions surge, and how gatekeepers shape demand.
Where it struggles: It describes status, not aesthetic achievement in the glass. Great for market analysis; not a guide to what a wine expresses.
It tells you who’s on the list and why—but not whether the wine sings.
8) Pragmatist–Deweyan Aesthetics (experience as growth)
What it claims: Value lies in a continuous experience that culminates, teaches, and changes the taster.
What it gets right: It honors the learning process and treats tasting as a practice that grows your capacities.
Where it struggles: It lacks a technical bridge from materials (acid, tannin, viscosity, CO₂, ) to expressive predicates (tense/relaxed, aerial/grounded, ascetic/generous). Without that bridge, you know you “grew,” but not how the wine’s form did the work.
It provides a beautiful account of the journey without accounting for the road.
Exploring the Philosophy of Food and Wine 