Terry Theise has long been my favorite wine writer. His book What Makes a Wine Worth Drinking: In Praise of the Sublime played a central role in helping me develop my arguments in Beauty and the Yeast. Recently he joined up with another wine writer I admire, Meg Maker, for a dialogue, “In Defense of Wine Writing” that is as much about tasting as it is about writing. It is a genuine dialogue of give and take but also reads like a manifesto from two deeply informed wine writers tired of the way wine is talked about and seeking to rescue the lived experience of drinking wine, and the possibility that writing can do justice to it.
As is my habit, I want to provide some theoretical ballast to their conversation.
Their core refusal is straightforward and unsurprising. They reject the dominant genre of wine description: the descriptor-list tasting note that inventories aromas and flavors, appends a score, and converts a bottle into a ranked commodity. They want something closer to a narrative of encounter—an account of what happened between a wine and a particular drinker in a particular moment. Theise and Maker aren’t denying that wines smell like things. They’re denying that listing those things is the right way to capture what matters.
I agree with that refusal. But I also think their essay becomes more powerful when you add a framework that can explain why the descriptor-list fails, and what a better alternative might be capable of doing.
Here are the main takeaways of their piece (at least from my point of view).
(1) The laundry-list tasting note is the wrong genre
At several points they go after what they call the “daisy chain” approach: blueberry, graphite, cedar, violets, cocoa, as if the wine were a basket of discrete objects you can point to one by one. The problem isn’t that these words are always false. The problem is that this approach assumes the wine’s “truth” is a set of isolable parts. But what if the most important things in wine aren’t parts? What I call expressive tasting starts from a different unit of analysis: a wine’s dynamic form. A wine is not primarily a bundle of notes; it’s an organization of forces. It has a line, a pace, a pressure, a way of arriving and departing. It has tension and release, compression and expansion, drag and glide, acceleration and taper. Those are not poetic overlays. They are perceptible structures felt in the mouth, across time, as the wine takes shape.
Aroma descriptors can be useful as a kind of shorthand, or as a memory aid. But they can’t substitute for something more fundamental: how the wine moves and in turn moves the taster.The descriptor-list is like trying to describe a dance by listing the dancer’s clothing.
(2) Texture and Gestalt matter more then flavor notes.
Theise explicitly mentions gestalt and texture as mattering more than aroma notes. This points to something wine education often gets backward. Texture isn’t a separate “dimension” alongside aroma. Texture is the medium in which a wine’s form becomes intelligible. Tannin isn’t just “present.” It has grain, torque, elasticity, a particular kind of friction. Acidity isn’t just “high.” It has edge, lift, propulsion, bite. Body isn’t just “full.” It has density gradients, inertia, breadth, compressive weight. And the finish isn’t just “long.” It has directionality—does it narrow to a point, broaden into resonance, snap shut, echo and shimmer?
When you begin with texture and how the wine evolves, you stop asking, “What are the notes?” and start asking, “What is the wine doing?” That shift alone changes everything: how you taste, how you talk about taste, and ultimately what you value.
(3) Wine press tasting conditions deform perception.
They’re unsparing about professional tasting conditions—the marathon tastings; the rapid cycling through far too many wines; the resulting the palate fatigue, and the performative certainty even as the wines begin to taste the same. A lot of wine criticism still works under a scientific fantasy: that the wine has stable properties, that the taster reports them, and that correctness is a matter of accurately labeling what’s “in the glass.”
But wine isn’t that kind of object.
What you experience is always a manifestation of a wine under conditions: temperature, glass, oxygen, sequence effects, food, mood, attention, and physiology. Under press-junket conditions you don’t encounter a wine’s expressive range; you force a thin slice of it to stand for the whole. And then, because the genre demands certainty, you report pseudo-stable “facts” (notes, scores) rather than acknowledging the wine’s variability and your partial access to those variations
This is where Theise and Maker are doing more than complaining about speed. They’re implicitly rejecting the idea that wine writing should aspire to laboratory-style objectivity. If wine is an event—kinetic, contextual, changeable—then the demand for repeatable “findings” is the wrong standard. The best writing won’t pretend away variability; it will learn to describe it.
(4) Standardized catechisms miseducate and intimidate
They also take aim at institutional vocabularies and the grid-based tasting and correctness norms that make people feel they must learn the “right words” or be exposed as impostors. Here I think it’s worth drawing a careful distinction.
The problem is not training. The problem is what the training trains you to do. If training teaches you that credibility comes from matching a fixed lexicon and labeling the “correct notes,” then it trains people to treat wine as a static object and tasting as error-correction. It also trains people to outsource perception to authority. But credibility doesn’t come from reciting approved descriptors. A good taster is not the person who can name the most aroma notes. It’s the person who can follow the wine’s movement, register its tensions, understand its internal negotiations, and articulate where it sits on meaningful gradients.
That’s the difference between catechism and pedagogy. A catechism gives you the approved answers. A pedagogy gives you better attention. In the end, that’s why wine education is important; it teaches you to pay attention and allow the wine to guide your attention. Both writers emphasize this.
(5) Aroma descriptors prime perception and narrow experience
Meg Maker makes a point that every honest taster recognizes: once someone says “strawberry,” people start tasting strawberry. If they don’t, they feel stupid. Tasting notes shape perception and channel attention.
This matters because it means the descriptor-list genre isn’t neutral. It actively trains drinkers to experience wine in a narrowed way toward searchable features rather than toward expressive organization.
A better tasting note doesn’t function like a spell that implants approved sensations. It functions like a map that helps you notice what is already there in the wine’s dynamics: the way it tightens, the way it releases, the way it turns a corner, the way structure and aroma lock together or drift apart. This is one reason I like the vocabulary of structure and dynamics: it directs attention without dictating a specific “thing” you must taste to be competent.
(6) Wine is performance; it comes into being as it’s drunk
They rely on performance metaphors—live music, theater, audience/actor reciprocity. Wine is kinetic. It changes. It doesn’t fully exist until it is engaged. So wine is an event.
If wine is an event, then evaluation is not the measurement of an object’s fixed traits. It is the appraisal of how a structured experience unfolds. This is why movement and tension should be central criteria of quality. It’s also why a wine’s stance, how it positions you as a perceiver, matters. Some wines invite; some demand. Some radiate ease; some impose discipline. Some are expansive; some are severe. These aren’t mood emojis. They are ways a wine organizes attention through its structure.
And this, I think, is what Theise and Maker are really defending when they say the tasting note should tell “the story of engagement.” They want writing that stays faithful to wine as lived experience rather than wine as an objectified commodity.
But the big question looming over the piece is: Why do people read tasting notes?
Theise and Maker circle this question, and it’s an important question. People read tasting notes for different reasons, and many disputes about wine writing are just mismatched expectations.
Some want purchase guidance and risk reduction. Some want calibration—“do I share this critic’s palate?” Some want education and training. Some want memories and a way to archive them. Some want aesthetic pleasure: good writing for its own sake. Some want social belonging.
The industry behaves as if only the first reason matters. Theise and Maker sometimes write as if the last reason is the one that needs defending:
“… but the meta message a reasonable reader of goodwill would carry away could be encapsulated as, “This sounds like a really lovely world.” Wouldn’t you like somebody to walk away from that piece, close the magazine, or power down the screen, and just think, Wow! That sounds like a really lovely world.”
But I think we can probably satisfy multiple motives at once, if we redefine “guidance” in terms of experiences rather than features.
A note can be useful and expressive if its usefulness lies in telling you what kind of experience the wine creates at least in that moment, at that location: its dynamic form, its tensions, its cadence, its stance—not just whether it has blueberry or cassis.
But alas, there is a sticking point where I have trouble following them. At moments they suggest wine is craft, not art, because it is a commercial product—made to be bought, sold, and consumed. And yet they also complain, persuasively, about wine writing that treats wine primarily as a commodity.
Even if we try to reconstruct them charitably—maybe they mean that wine’s telos is use and consumption, so writing should honor experience rather than pure contemplation—the premise is still too quick: being bought and sold does not disqualify something from being art.
Plenty of art is sold. Much of music lives inside markets. Film is mostly an industrial product and thoroughly commodified. Architecture is functional and commercial. None of that settles the question about whether they are arts. Commodification is a sociological fact, not an ontological verdict.
The real question is whether winemaking can embody expressive intention and interpretive control under constraint—whether it can create perceptible form that rewards aesthetic attention and admits of better and worse realization. On that question, I think the answer is yes. And interestingly, much of what Theise and Maker want from wine writing—attention to form, texture, movement, engagement—sounds like exactly what you’d want if you were taking wine’s expressiveness seriously in the way we take art’s expressiveness seriously.
So I’m with them on most of the diagnosis. I’m with them on the need to rescue experience from the pseudo-objective tasting note and the transactional genre. But I want to push one step further: the very reasons they give for defending wine writing—the kinetic, performed, form-rich nature of wine—are also reasons to resist the idea that commercial status bars wine from the category of art.
Their defense of wine writing is also a defense of wine’s expressive value and a defense of tasting as a kind of aesthetic attention, not merely consumer intelligence. Their wine writing embodies this approach. Hopefully, their dialogue is the harbinger of a changing paradigm in tasting as well as writing.
Exploring the Philosophy of Food and Wine 