Geek Sheets

On the Twisted Oak web site you won't find a lot of wine weenie data on the wine web pages. You basically get our back label copy, which we hope will help you make an informed purchase decision because we are so darn entertaining...

OK, back from Fantasyland... on every wine page you will find a link to a "Geek Sheet" which will tell you everything you ever wanted to know about the wine.

The problem is, our Geek Sheets, while informative, are boring and flat. They are the most un-Twisted thing about this place! While we have been content for a while to wallow in the irony of it, that is now going to change...

With the release of our 2004 Silvaspoons Vineyard Petite Sirah, we are rolling out a new Geek Sheet, which you can find here. Gone are the bare numbers and bland tasting notes. In are tasting notes that actually say something*, and a graphical representation of the numbers to help get a sense of what they mean. To the left is a snippet...

Graphical? It's time for El Jefe to "out" himself. It's true. I am 100% geek. I even have a ham radio license (I know that's hard to believe.) One of the radio magazines I read does extensive testing of new radios, measuring all sorts of specifications. They print these specs using the same kind of graphical method we're trying here.

In Radioland, the specs are generally "bad" (red) or "good" (green), and the numbers slide between those two ends.

In Wineland, our specs are not necessarily good or bad, but instead they relate to the sensory experience. Is the wine crisp or soft? Light or full bodied?

We've tried to use appropriate colors and text in our graphs to give a sense of what you might experience when you drink the wine. We hope it works and that you agree.

Please do let us know what you think. Let us have it. We can take it!

* OK, so the notes are a little over the top. I blame the wine...

Comments

[wineguy]

Those are very interesting graphs indeed. I would love to see how some "standard" wines -- meaning wines we might all be familiare with -- check out for comparison's sake.

[El Jefe]

Thanks! Certainly any wine could be graphed, you just need the data. But for comparisons it would be interesting to see how a typical Viognier looks vs a typical Chardonnay, for example. I'll see what I can come up with.

On the other hand, the proof is in the tasting, to twist a phrase. All the stats and specs really show is that we didn't screw it up too badly... cheers! - j

[Josh]

Awesome. Glad to see this approach getting a little bit of traction.

Kudos El Jefe!

[John]

What a concept whose time has come.
Maybe there could be a last one showing some type of "Food Compatibility" as well. In my eyes, as a consumer, but also from a marketing point of view of the wine industry, (or maybe not if your wine hovers near 17.0 alcohol), it seems like a no-brainer.
If bloggers/readers could push the retailers to get on the band-wagon to push the distributors, to push the wineries & importers...NIRVANA.
Great work!
John-Ohio

[El Jefe]

John - Thanks for the great comment! A graphical Food Compatibility is an interesting idea. I'm just not very sure how it would work directly on a single line graph.

I've thought about a bar graph sort of thing with food categories - the length of the bar indicating the suitability.

The problem is that there are so darn many foods! I had a nice Pinot Noir last night with grilled halibut and they did very well together - but if I hadn't grilled over charcoal would it have worked as well? There's the rub...

I keep coming back to simply making several suggestions for each wine to give an idea of what might work. I'm sure that by knowing our Petite Sirah goes well with grilled Spam, or with chunky peanut butter on whole wheat toast, you can extrapolate...

OK, maybe a few more suggestions are called for... in any case I will take this as a kick in the pants and get that info into the data sheets!

What do you think? - j

[Alexander]

Appreciate the well done graphs. The above suggestions are also excellent. It's a good start to get one to ponder the degree of thisness or thatness in a wine. Thanks.