For the past few years, I have been posting my Top-Rated White & Sparkling and Red wines for the current year of tasting. This year I posted my Top-Rated wines for 2019. My articles with ratings:
I categorized the white and red wines according to Old and New World and then within I grouped the BC wines at the top of the New World sections. Putting on my Data Scientist hat, I generated Word Clouds using up to 2500 words for the white wines and 5000 words for the red wines (as I had more favourite red wines) to see which words were the most prominent.
What terms show up most often for the wines I rate highly? Let’s dive in and see.
Top Rated White and Sparkling Wines Word Clouds
On the white wine side, Chardonnay shows up as the grape variety that gets rated highly most often. I do enjoy a white wine showing fruit, in particular tropical, apple and pears, and I don’t mind oak as butterscotch shows up quite large. Acidity and oak are about the same size so I do like the balance between these components in white wines.
Top Rated Red Wines Word Clouds
As with white wines, I do like fruit showing in my red wines. Red fruits seem to lead a little more than black fruits. I do like ripe aromas and flavours as well as acidity in my red wines. I do prefer a dry red wine with medium-plus to full body. I was surprised to see Syrah showing up fairly small, but no other red grape variety. It could be an artifact of the word cloud generator not using all the words input.
I re-ran the word cloud generator a few times and did see that “Pinot” shows up as shown below. I also see that “tannins” show up. I do like my red wines to have some structure. There are still many common large terms between the two word clouds, such as black and red for fruit flavours.
To be a thorough person, I re-generated my white wine word cloud to see if any other terms popped up. Lemon and grapefruit do show up more prominently in this word cloud, but as you can see, Chardonnay, apple, tropical, acidity, and oak still show up.
Of course the descriptors that I used for my favourite wines are based on many BC wines I tasted. If I were in Germany, or South Africa, or Rioja in Spain and tasted mainly wines from there, my word clouds would likely have some differences as the wine styles are different from BC.
I did a word cloud review for my top-rated wines from 2018. I see many commonalities. You may want to see my 2018 wine word clouds and read my comments.
Karl: Intesting take on tasting notes. Well done!
Thanks Julian. Have a great Holiday season.