The tasting note is an elusive and sometimes controversial and intimidating part of the wine world. Anyone can create them but few of us do. Some people swear by them while others hate them. A few make a living off of them while others scribble them on napkins. Some live out their fantasies as poets in their tasting notes while others use cryptic shorthand that only they can understand. Tasting notes can make or break a winery or can end up crumpled in someone’s pocket destined for the spin cycle never to be seen again.

For those tasting notes that actually make it online, we want to help them live up to their full potential. That is, to offer a usable profile of not only the wine and producer but also of the reviewer. What do I mean by this? Well, imagine if you could take all tasting notes written in any language for a particular wine from several web sites, normalize their scores into a consistent scale, extract and summarize the tasting descriptors from all reviewers, apply an authority filter to add weight to tasting notes from recognized experts, and then provide a single global view of the wine from all of this information. This would give you a powerful tasting profile of a wine that is the true result of what people are actually experiencing. And this view can be expanded to provide tasting profiles at the vintage, producer, region, and varietal levels. Sound interesting? Scrugy is already doing this today!

Recently I wrote about Scrugy’s support for microformats. In this post I’d like to take it a step further and talk about what I like to call High Definition Tasting Notes, or HDTNs.

Today’s “standard definition” tasting note typically includes the name of the wine, when it was tasted, a score, and a description of the wine. The description can take the form of just a few key tasting descriptors such as ”black cherry”, “full-bodied”, and “smooth tannins” or it can include paragraphs describing both the wine and the tasting experience itself. Modern wine community sites such as Cork’d and WineLog.net also allow users to indicate one or more terms as tags. These tags are helpful in isolating key elements of the tasting note and then allow aggregation of those tags via tag clouds. However, when it comes to capturing finer granularity in tasting descriptors for a wine the typical web 2.0 tagging approach falls short. On its own a tag cannot account for the additional dimensions of intensity, tasting timeline (when the descriptor occurred during the taste), and whether the descriptor was appealing or not to the reviewer. By intensity I mean whether the tasting descriptor was picked up as just a hint or was it a dominant flavor. For the timeline, was the flavor detected at the front, middle, finish or throughout the taste?

It is the addition of these additional dimensions to the standard tag that adds “high definition” to a tasting note. Now instead of just seeing the most prominent flavors and textures that the reviewer detected in a wine, with more definition you get a more nuanced and finer grained view of the wine.  A “hint of cherries on the front”, “too much toasted oak throughout”, “beautifully soft tannins on the finish” is much more telling than simply “cherries”, “toasted oak”, ”smooth tannins”.

So what does one of these HDTNs look like? Well, the beauty of using microformats to annotate a tasting note means that it can look any way you’d like. One of the microformat principles is to “design for humans first, machines second”. This means that microformats should not intrude on the “look” of the content they annotate.

Let’s look at an example. Here is a tasting note that has been fully annotated using microformats. The styling has been kept plain on purpose.

The tasting note tells us a lot about the wine, the reviewer, and the reviewer’s evaluation of the wine. And there are some tags broken out into the categories “appearance”, “aroma”, “taste”, and “texture”. You will also notice that some tags are displayed using a larger or smaller font. In this case, the font size of the tag represents the intensity of the tasting descriptor in the wine.

Now let’s look at the HTML source code for the tasting note. I have marked all standard microformat class names in bold and all wine-specific class names in blue.

<div class="hreview tn“>

  <h2 class=”item wine“>
    <span class=”fn“>
      <span class=”vintage“>2003</span>
      <span class=”producer“>Scott Harvey</span>
      <span class=”designation“>Mountain Selection</span>
      <span class=”varietal“>Zinfandel</span>
      <span class=”region“>Amador County</span>
    </span>
    <span class=”country“>USA</span>
    <abbr class=”alcohol” title=”14.5″>14.5%</abbr>
  </h2>

  <p class=”description“>
    Scott Harvey has deep roots in the Sierra Foothills and it
    shows in his red label zinfandel. The color is not as dark
    as many zins from this area but the flavors are fruity yet
    lean. A very nice zin.
  </p>

  <p>Reviewed by
    <span class=”reviewer vcard“>
      <a class=”url fn” href=”http://www.secondleaf.com”>
        james
      </a>
    </span>
    on
    <abbr class=”dtreviewed” title=”2006-11-03T18:19:00-0800″>
      Friday, November 3, 2006
    </abbr>
  </p>

  <p class=”rating“>Score:
    <span class=”value“>3.9</span>
    out of
    <span class=”best“>5</span>
  </p>

  <p>Price:
    <span class=”money“>
      <abbr class=”currency” title=”USD”>$</abbr>
      <abbr class=”amount” title=”13.99″>13.99</abbr>
      <abbr class=”unit” title=”750ml”>/bottle</abbr>
    </span>
  </p>

  <h4>Tags</h4>

  <p class=”appearance“>Appearance:
    <a rel=”tag” class=”tnd hint-medium” href=”…/tag/medium”>
      medium
    </a>,
    <a rel=”tag” class=”tnd” href=”…/tag/garnet”>garnet</a>
  </p>

  <p class=”aroma“>Aroma:
    <a rel=”tag” class=”tnd” href=”…/tag/tar”>tar</a>,
    <a rel=”tag” class=”tnd” href=”…/tag/raspberry”>raspberry</a>,
    <a rel=”tag” class=”tnd hint” href=”…/tag/spice”>spice</a>
  </p>

  <p class=”taste“>Taste:
    <a rel=”tag” class=”tnd medium-strong” href=”…/tag/raspberry”>
      raspberry
    </a>,
    <a rel=”tag” class=”tnd medium-strong” href=”…/tag/cranberry”>
      cranberry
    </a>,
    <a rel=”tag” class=”tnd” href=”…/tag/spice”>spice</a>,
    <a rel=”tag” class=”tnd” href=”…/tag/tart”>tart</a>,
    <a rel=”tag” class=”tnd” href=”…/tag/caramel”>caramel</a>
  </p>

  <p class=”texture“>Texture:
    <a rel=”tag” class=”tnd” href=”…/tag/vibrant”>vibrant</a>,
    <a rel=”tag” class=”tnd” href=”…/tag/lean”>lean</a>
  </p>

</div>

Now I realize there is a lot here so let’s break it down. The entire note itself is wrapped in an element with the class names “hreview” and “tn”. “hreview” is the microformat class name indicating that the interior of the element represents a review of something. This something could be a product, service, business, event, etc. In our case, we’re reviewing a wine. The class name “tn” further specifies that this review is a “tasting note”. This is important should a site review more than just wines on their pages (i.e. reviews of wineries, wine gadgets, regions, and so on).

There are four basic parts to the content inside the “hreview” div: wine identification, tasting description/notes, tasting details, and tasting tags.

The wine identification is wrapped in an element using the “item” class name. Within the “item”, there is the “fn” class. This represents the formatted name for the item. In this case, the item is a wine. Since the name of a wine can be broken down into relevant and useful pieces, there are class names for the wine’s vintage, producer, designation, varietal(s), and region. The only logically required elements here are producer and at least one of designation, varietal(s), or region. Two other item elements captured in this case include the country and alcohol. Since these elements are not part of the wine’s name they are not included inside the “fn” element.

Next, the description or notes for the tasting note are indicated with the “description” class.

There are also details about the tasting event itself including information about the “reviewer”, when the wine was reviewed (”dtreviewed”), the reviewer’s score (”rating”) for the wine, and how much was paid (or the cost) of the wine.

Finally, the last element of this tasting note that I’d like to describe are the tasting descriptors or “tags”.  The hReview microformat allows for zero or more tags to be associated with the review using the “tag” class. In order to support the “high definition” concepts that I described above, Scrugy allows tags to be grouped into 5 categories: appearance, aroma, taste, texture, and overall. To support intensity, the class names of “hint”, “hint-medium”, “medium”, “medium-strong”, and “strong” can be specified. The default is “medium”. For tasting timeline, the class names “throughout”, “start”, “start-middle”, “middle”, “middle-finish”, or “finish” can be used. The default timeline is “throughout”. Lastly, to indicate whether a particular descriptor was pleasing or not, the reviewer can use the VoteLinks microformat (the default is “vote-abstain” unless otherwise obvious as a wine flaw).

So to wrap up this long post, here is an excerpt of HTML source code that represents the tasting phrase: “hint of cherries on the front, too much toasted oak throughout, and beautifully soft tannins on the finish”.

...
hint of
<a rel="tag” class=”tnd hint start” href=”…/tag/cherry”>
  cherries
</a>
on the front, too much
<a rel=”tag” class=”tnd” rev=”vote-against” href=”…/tag/toasted+oak”>
  toasted oak
</a>
throughout, and beautifully
<a rel=”tag” class=”tnd finish” rev=”vote-for” href=”…/tag/soft+tannins”>
  soft tannins
</a>
on the finish.
…

In my next post I will describe how the information expressed in tasting notes using microformats and the wine-specific extensions described here can be put to use to make incredibly powerful wine recommendations and support the emergence of tasting profiles at the reviewer, producer/winery, varietal, and region levels.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 13th, 2006 at 10:01 pm by james and is filed under New Features, Feature Spotlights. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.