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Entitled 'An Artist's Palate' the piece details the work by artist Johnny Jonas. I have a hard enough time keeping up with the luminaries of the wine world let alone the sphere of portrait artists but Jonas has painted such people as the Queen Mother, a Field Marshall and sundry parlimentarians.
He has also developed a 'wine recognition system' that displays a wines flavour though graphical representation. He even refers to each finished piece as a 'portrait', which strikes me as typical artist pompousness but he has managed to encompass the strength of a wines aroma and whether the wine is soft and rounded or crisp and acidic.
The system is now refined and patented worldwide; not convinced myself that it is easy to 'see' the wine as you can in, say, a photograph but then the information being imparted is more specific than a feeling or mood invoked by a picture. The final wine 'portraits' are quite complex but the premise is to display flavour in a graphical form which they certainly do. There is a 'scientific' overtone to the finished image.
The Drinks Business article finishes with an interesting thought:
If Jonas's thinking is just too blue-sky for us busy Westerners, consider for a moment the enormous potential of the Chinese wine market where people have been writing in 'pictures' for centuries."
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Comments
From: Philip James (May 19, 2008 7:01 PM)
I think this is truly excellent. I think the linear plotting of dimensions like acidity and tannin isnt the most intuitive or remember-able, but the shape descriptors are utterly perfect in the way they convey the underlying information: sharp vs rounded corners, and the wave profile makes it easy to imagine the wine's development in the mouth.
--Philip
PS. You have the funniest captcha system i've ever seen
From: Arthur (May 20, 2008 2:45 AM)
Intersting. Potentially useful - depending on targe audience.
Is this free-use or is it patented/trademarked?
From: Andrew (May 20, 2008 6:25 AM)
It is patented, Arthur.
From: Arthur (May 20, 2008 8:34 AM)
Yeah, I missed that on my initial reading. I caught it after I already clicked “submit”.
This concept reminds me of some helpful shorthand used to graphically notate laboratory results in patient chards. However, this gets a bit busy (and maybe confusing) for some.
I’ve been trying to come up with something like this - but even more intuitive. The challenge is making it informative without it becoming too cluttered.
I have to defer to the Geek Box used (and created?) by Josh Hermsmeyer of pinotblogger.com
From: Nancy (May 20, 2008 4:00 PM)
Wow. I'm sorry to say, I would find these geometric shapes incomprehensible and a complete turn off. Why not simply use streaks of color instead? Vivid hues for full body, thin streaks for acidity, and so on? Hey -- should I patent that?
From: Andrew (May 20, 2008 4:11 PM)
I must admit you do have to give them more than a cursory glance - but then there are 6 or so different aspects to encapsulate in one symbol.
From: edward (May 23, 2008 4:20 PM)
Andrew,
It's very clever, but I wonder if it is too idiosyncratic to be of much use. I guess one very good thing about it, is it forces you to think about individual components of the wine in question. A limitation, is that very soon many wines start to have a similar pictogram. I would imagine a riesling would look like a sauvignon blanc which would look like a semillon.