Expressive Wine Tasting: A New Tasting Model

I think we need a new conversation about wine quality.

Wine quality is not about a high score from critics. There are many quality wines that don’t receive high scores. And it isn’t about power, complexity, or balance. These standard criteria can track competence, and sometimes they track greatness. But they don’t tell you what matters most when you’re actually tasting: whether the wine has something clear and distinctive to say. A balanced wine can still feel generic. A “big” wine can be dull; a complex wine incoherent.

A wine that has something clear and distinctive to say is “expressive.” So that is what I look for in a wine, and it is why I call my method of wine tasting “expressive tasting.” Expressive tasting is about discovering what a wine has to say. What follows is an attempt to explain what I mean by that.

When I say wine is expressive, I mean it has a personality you can feel as you taste it. An expressive wine has a recognizable way of unfolding. It has tension, release, and direction. Its flavors and textures don’t just sit there on your palate; they interact, change, yet hold together over time. Expressiveness is about how the wine enters, how it changes across the mid-palate, how it finishes, and what kind of energy it leaves behind. Aromas too are part of expressiveness. They supply tone and intelligibility. They put a face on the structure. And aromas also are dynamic—volatile, ephemeral, and always changing.

So we  don’t taste expressiveness by asking “what flavors are here?” We ask, “what is the wine doing?”

This idea of “doing” matters because wine’s dynamism is productive. On the palate, it’s constantly shifting and doing work as it changes. Aromas lift and fade, acidity sharpens or softens, tannins grip and then melt, fruit swells and recedes. And all these dimensions of the wine influence each other. Acid conspires with tannins to influence how fruit is expressed. Aromatic lift can influence how texture is perceived. A wine doesn’t simply have body; the body of a wine is a shapeshifter undergoing several variations before its finish makes a final statement. Some wines feel flat because nothing much happens. Others feel alive because they organize change. They don’t just have flavors and textures but have dynamic form as well. Think of dynamic form as the wine’s flow pattern.

All of that is what I’m after with “expressiveness.”

Expressiveness is a better marker of quality than more traditional criteria because it’s what separates merely correct wine from compelling wine. Expressiveness depends on terroir and craft, but it also asks craft and vineyard to serve meaning—to have something to say. Quality is the wine’s achievement of intelligible, distinctive form—how well it organizes its elements into a coherent experience that can communicate mood, place, and intention, rather than simply meeting a checklist of quality markers. Here is a useful way to think about it: expressive wines reveal a pattern of vitality. They show you a coherent style of motion—surging, gliding, coiling, expanding, tightening—much the way a piece of music can feel urgent or serene without “meaning” anything specific. In other words, wine expresses vitality via its dynamic form.

It is of course true that quality wine expresses characteristics of the place in which the grapes were grown. But if that is to be meaningful, that expression of place must show up in how the wine tastes and feels.

If this is at all persuasive, then it means we must rethink the much-maligned tasting note. We will need vocabulary for describing expressiveness. As many critics have pointed out, a long list of aroma notes doesn’t tell you much about what makes a wine compelling, and adding a few comments about body or finish length only marginally helps. This is because we don’t taste individual notes; we taste relations. The various dimensions of a wine are in a dynamic relation with each other. And as mentioned above, these relations do work. They produce flavor, texture, and movement, and that dynamism is what we have to learn to describe.

When trying to describe expressive wines, I reach for words like joyful, brooding, tense, generous, severe, or playful because we’re trying to name those dynamic patterns we taste, and the vocabulary of human personality and emotions is handy and useful for that purpose. We use these words to describe how a person’s behavior expresses their vitality, their way of living in the moment as they react to the world around them. That rich vocabulary that connects mood and behavioral movement can be used to describe a wine’s vitality because it is familiar and complex enough to capture wine’s dynamic form.

These words that describe emotions or personality aren’t mystical or flights of fancy. The aim is not to be poetic. They’re convenient shorthand for what the wine’s structure is doing. But the expressive vocabulary can be broader and not human-related. You can describe the wine’s stance—bright and cutting, dark and grounded, airy and lifted, severe and vertical—because the structure and movement of the wine supports those impressions.

Expressive tasting doesn’t ignore aromas and isn’t in opposition to traditional methods of tasting. But it puts less emphasis on conjuring every fleeting scent and puts more emphasis on how the dominant aromas are organized and how they interact with texture and dynamic form to say what is distinctively expressive about each wine. Each wine is ideally a system of distinctive, dynamic relations. And the job of expressive tasting is to uncover that system.

Here is an example of a review that deploys this tasting model.