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Tim Atkin MW: Savouring wine's hues

De La Rivière’s thesis is that “we no longer know how to talk about colour in wine” and I think she has a point. Vision is not the forgotten sense – the title of an equally interesting book by Professor Jonas Olofsson – but it’s certainly overlooked by most wine professionals. I’m as guilty as anyone. I hardly, if ever, talk about colour in tasting notes. When I was teaching consumers, I used to tell them that red wines lose colour as they age, while white wines gain it, but that was the limit of my advice.

Descriptions of a wine’s hue and intensity are required to pass the WSET’s Diploma, as well as the Master of Wine exam, but once we’ve jumped through these academic hoops, those of us who assess wines for a living concentrate on their nose and palate. These two things are connected, of course, because of retro-nasal olfaction. We smell while we taste.

But what about sight? In her wonderful book A Natural History of the Senses, the poet Diane Ackerman calls vision “the great monopolist of all our senses”, comparing it to a pair of “top-flight stereoscopic binoculars”. “It is mainly through seeing the world that we appraise and understand it,” she writes. And yet that is not the case with wine for most of us.

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Waking up to colour

Why do we ignore the evidence of our eyes? I think there are two main reasons. The first is that colour is rarely an indication of quality – a glass of 19 Crimes Red might look much the same as one of Penfolds’ Grange. The second is that sight can deceive our other senses. The story may be apocryphal, but someone who worked at IDV at the time once told me that when the company was doing consumer research for Le Piat d’Or (the wine that the French were said to “adore”), the winning sample was a Liebfraumilch coloured with red food dye. Deeper colour doesn’t necessarily correspond to greater concentration or structure either. Nebbiolo is generally paler than Dolcetto, but has way more tannin.

At the French Institute, De La Rivière told us that a wine’s colour is like its face. It’s what we notice first, its calling card if you like. But to understand what’s in the glass, we need our other senses, too, as well as a degree of experience. As Jean-Claude Berrouet, formerly the winemaker at Châteu Pétrus in Pomerol, one of dozens of insightful winemakers quoted in her book, points out, “knowledge makes our perception more intelligent”.

That doesn’t mean we should ignore or dismiss the visual aspect of wine. Indeed, this sumptuously illustrated book, benefiting from the beautiful photos of Jérôme Bryon, is an invitation to “taste with our eyes”. De La Rivière’s aim is to present us with a “chromatic vocabulary” that we can all share. To do so, she divides white, red and rosé wines into groups of colours. Such distinctions are useful, although I suspect that the most evocative descriptions of colour are metaphors or similes rather than words like inky or ruby. Galileo, for instance, talked of wine as “sunlight captured in water”.

The main reason for appreciating colour in wine – something that changes over time, let us remember, not just in the glass, but in the barrel and bottle, too – is aesthetic. Last year at a tasting in Georgia, I took a photo of a flight of qvevri wines. To recreate the differences between them would have challenged Velázquez, Monet or Caravaggio. Wine’s variegated colours are almost infinite. They should delight and engage our eyes.

Listening to De La Rivière, with her plea to “take the time to look”, made me think of something an art-loving friend of mine told me recently. The average amount of time that visitors spend in front of a painting in a gallery is three seconds. It’s a smash and grab that leaves you with nothing to remember. From now on, I’m going to look at wine in a new way.

• vision
• Wine Colour
• Joshua C. Taylor
• Barry Smith
• L’Oeil du Vin
• The Look of Wine
• Florence de La Rivière
• hue
• intensity