Unclassifiable

The wine bestiary

Sixteen animals hide in your tasting notes

The wine bestiary
16
different animals identified in Tastee's tasting comments — from horse, cited 200 times, to rabbit, cited just once.

Open enough professional tasting notebooks and an animal always ends up climbing out of the glass. Not a polite metaphor — a real animal, written down in black and white, sometimes with more detail than anyone asked for.

Sixteen animals, one glass

At the date of this analysis, out of the 4,143,729 tasting expressions analysed by Tastee, we spotted no fewer than 16 creatures with feathers (occasionally) or fur (mostly). And we're probably not done yet…

Horse crushes the competition, with dog and mouse trailing well behind — three classics that owe a lot to brettanomyces yeast. The rest of the ranking, though, is mostly a showcase of inventiveness: nobody quite explains how you get from a glass of wine to beaver, camel, or squirrel, and that's exactly as it should be.

Gems from the notebook

We promised not to over-explain, so here instead are a few quotes picked straight from the comments — unedited:

« A dog gnawing a bone from a one-eyed butcher »

« Flavours of damp moss recently trodden by wild boars »

« Like Pavlov's dog's saliva »

A vocabulary worth owning

None of this is a slip of the tongue: it's proof that professional tasting has a far wider imagination than it's usually given credit for. Next time a glass reminds you of something other than fruit, it's probably not you losing the plot. It might just be the right word your notebook is still missing.

Source: Tastee database — 936,277 distinct expressions, drawn from millions of tasting comments written for the most part by professionals around the world, each in their own language.

Your tasting notes are worth more than what you do with them

Thousands of comments sit dormant in notebooks, spreadsheets, and inboxes. Tastee turns them into sensory profiles, shareable reports, and ready-to-use materials — from a single cuvée's profile to an appellation's typicity, in every language your tasters write in.

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