Against the tasting note

It is harvest, so the room is closed on weekdays and I am writing this at the sorting table between crates. Which is fitting, because everything I dislike about tasting notes starts with people who have never stood at one.

Here is a real note, from a real bottle, from a shop I will not name:

Exuberant notes of ripe stone fruit dance with hints of tropical sunshine, leading to a lingering, elegant finish of honeyed citrus and subtle minerality.

That is thirty words. It could describe about four thousand wines. It does not tell you whether you will like it, what to eat with it, or whether it is dry.

Four words

Every Stonecrop wine gets four descriptors, and it is written into the way this website is built: the list will not accept five. We choose words you could smell in a kitchen or a field — bruised quince, wet wool, black pepper, cold ash — and we choose the four that people at the bar actually say back to us, not the four we would like them to say.

Then we tell you what to eat with it and what temperature to serve it at. Those two lines change what the wine tastes like far more than any adjective.

The first glass is blind

When you sit down for The Whole Wall, the first pour comes without a name. We ask you to say one thing about it — anything — before we tell you what it is.

People hate this for about ninety seconds. Then something changes: they stop trying to be right and start actually tasting. The Pale Ledge rosé is the one we usually lead with, since people who see the pale colour first decide it is a white and taste a white. Poured blind in a black glass, nobody has ever called it anything but red fruit.

What I would like you to do

Ignore our four words, if you like. Write your own. But write things you could point to. The best note anyone has ever left in the book on the bar was for the Beaten Acre, and it said: my grandad’s shed. It is the most accurate thing written about that wine, including anything we wrote.