Alright. it’s January 2012. I’m full of ideas and energy.  I just finished up the Trah Lah Lah 2010 blend (it’s awesome) and I want to celebrate that.  So I’m going to post songs with a lyric like Trah Lah Lah or Tra la la or Tra Lee Lah or whatever until I run out of songs.  Feel free to contribute your own favorites by email or in the comment section.

Here is the first TRAH LAH LAH January post!

Gene Kelly and Oscar Levant perform Tra La La in the film adaptation of An American in Paris

How much Trah Lah Lah do you have to drink before you start tap dancing?

I love the name New French wine.  I could be part of a New France movement.  Very inline with the Outsiders group.  Thanks for the comment, Jane!  Really nice to hear that we’re doing something right and that all of our work is paying off. 🙂

I got to see a lot of British friends while I was on Naked Wines UK Tour this summer.  Even Jancis Robinson, the queen bee herself attended our London tasting.  And she had exceptionally positive things to say about the innovation at Naked Wines and also the quality of wine.

Overall quality of Naked Wines

“There are no duds, even if most of the offerings are of solid rather than mind-blowing quality – but the range is really interesting (see, for example, boutique Chileans, dry Germans, the stunning value Strathbogie Pinot and Slovenians). And if you search for GV (good value), you will find some VGV and the odd VVGV. But please be warned that not all of these wines will still be available. You can check at www.nakedwines.com.”

Jancis correctly points out that the entire range at Naked is solid quality and there are many hidden gems with very good value.  She also acknowledges that the listed prices are 30% higher than the discounted price available to the thousands and thousands of Naked Angels, paid members of the site.

Impression of the Winemakers

“We were allowed in early at the beginning of the tasting session and it was rather sweet to see this collection of mainly young men, all in the same Naked Wines T-shirt, chatting excitedly with each other, rather like freshers on their first day at university.”

I did like this bit about how the winemakers (myself included) were standing about the room before the tasting like a bunch of first years at university. 🙂  It’s a remarkably accurate description as the whole tour reminded me a lot of college.  Roaming around a new environment with a bunch of great people I just met.  Free shirts.  A bit of drinking. 🙂

O’Vineyards Tasting Notes

I don’t cater my winemaking to specific journalists, but it’s always really nice to hear that very accomplished wine pros who have been around the block like what I’m doing. 🙂

O’Vineyards, Trah Lah Lah 2008 IGP La Cité de Carcassonne 16.5 Drink 2011-2015
Made by Ryan and Joe O’Connell. 65% Merlot, 35% Cabernet Sauvignon. Deep crimson. Nicely integrated. Sweet start and attractively dry, lively finish. Still a bit chewy but chock full of life. 13.5%
£12.99 Naked Wines

O’Vineyards, O’ Syrah 2008 IGP La Cité de Carcassonne 16 Drink 2011-2014
Dry and minerally. Really rather smooth and well mannered.
£14.99 Naked Wines

And I’m not the only one she liked. As mentioned above, no duds in this tasting. The Languedoc did exceptionally well as we represent an important part of the Naked Wines portfolio. Winemaker Ben Darnault got one of the many Good Value awards in Jancis’ notes for his highly drinkable “Very Languedoc” Minervois. And Hegarty-Chamans put forward some nice wines that raised her brow. Always interesting things to drink in the Languedoc. 🙂

As some of you know, I’ve been doing semantic analyses of wine reviews we receive online.  Mostly, I’ve used this data to make silly computer-generated wine reviews.  But today I’m going to use the data to talk a bit about word clouds and word frequency.

Robert Parker’s most used words

Robert Parker is one of the most influential wine critics on earth and he popularized a one hundred point rating scale which dominates the US wine market.  An American named Tom Wark did some data gathering about Robert Parker’s perfect scored wines.  Basically, he looked at the 224 wines that had received a perfect score of 100 from Robert Parker.

Wark published the list of words that appear the most in tasting notes for 100 point wines.  This should give us some insight into what sort of characteristics appear in wines that Parker thought of as perfect.

For words like “Elegan” or “Intens”, the reason they cut off like that is because Wark grouped Intense, intensely, intensity, and other nearly identical words into one word group labeled simply “Intens”.  Fair enough!

What we get is that Parker uses the word rich a ton when he tastes a wine that merits 100 points out of 100.  Intensity, concentration and spiciness also come up a lot.  Minerality, massiveness, balance, complexity and length are also in there.

I think this is a really fun idea.  Because I’m a data nerd.

Customer comments – Tastes Like Wine

So Parker often describes “perfect” wines as rich, intense and concentrated.  What words do my customers use most?

Yes, rather hilariously, the most used words are Taste Like Wine.  Not together mind you.

So I did an analysis of customer comments regarding Trah Lah Lah 2008 on Naked Wines, an online wine retailer that represents and promotes us in the UK.   The word cloud above is a graphical representation of the words used most frequently in reviews, and the most common words appear in larger font size.  I generated the word cloud above using wordle, although I did move some of the words around in a graphic program later on to emphasize the tastes like wine joke. But the size of the words is accurate!  I just moved them to the top of the cloud. Wordle also automatically removes definite articles, personal pronouns, possessive adjectives and certain other words that are more about syntax than meaning.

Now, there is a huge difference between what Naked Wines customers say about Trah Lah Lah 2008 and what Robert Parker says about wines he rates as 100 points, namely because very few of the comments wine drinkers left on Naked are in “tasting note” form.  Instead of striving for journalistic, objective tasting notes about richness or spice, people tend to write about their whole wine experience.  It seems pretty normal that the most used words include “taste” “like” and “wine”.  😀   Personal pronouns and possessive adjectives (I, me, our, its) appear much more frequently.

Here is a list of the words that got used most (I think I might have taken out all the definite articles and certain words that only serve syntax) and the number of times that word appeared.

1. I   94
2. wine    52
3. not    32
4. really    23
5. bottle    22
6. we    21
7. again    20
8. you    20
9. good    19
10. very    18
11. like    18
12. some    18
13. my    18
14. taste    18
15. buy    15
16. french    15
17. red    14
18. more    14
19. me    13
20. just    13
21. if    13
22. well    13
23. quite    12
24. one    12
25. first    12
26. bit    10
27. better    10
28. too    10
29. all    10
30. wines    10

Is there a meaningful difference between Parker 100 tasting notes and Naked Wines customer comments?

So there is a huge difference in which words appear the most.  But is this a meaningful difference?  Well, for the most part, this is not a good comparison.  But it is a very fun comparison and it inspires certain ideas.

For one thing, why are tasting notes built the way they are?  Why do wine critics try to objectively describe flavors and odors in wines?

When they do try to refer to the overall experience of the wine, why does their vocabulary focus on richness, depth, complexity and so on? Wine drinkers don’t think this way (at least not according to this small sample from Naked Wines customer reviews of Trah Lah Lah 2008).

Again, this isn’t really a fair comparison because tasting notes aren’t the same as customer comments.  Tasting notes are specifically built to describe the experience of a wine.  Customer comments can be anything.  They can be about an overall experience, they can be about a specific pairing the person tried, they can be simpler statements (eg I liked it, I didn’t like it), they can be congratulatory or simply grateful (eg Thanks!, Good job, guys!).   This means that customer reviews won’t limit themselves to particular vocabulary like tasting note jargon.

Now, even if we limit the analysis of customer comments to only the descriptive words (like rich, intense, etc.) we get a list that’s pretty far from Parker’s. The most common are Really, Very, Good. 😀  Of course the statistics can be a bit misleading since Not is even more common than those!  The first descriptive words that appear on the list which might be described as more precise are “French” and “Red”.  😀

Also, I’m only using the 100 point scores from Parker but I’m using all comments for my Trah Lah Lah 2008 on Naked Wines. One might argue that the reason Trah Lah Lah comments don’t have the word rich is because the wine is not 100 points.  So I will admit right here and now that this is bad science.  This is not a perfect comparison.  However, it still illustrates my notion that wine critics use a vocabulary that is actually somewhat foreign to the average wine drinker.

You can also argue that wine drinkers lack the refinement or courage to say things like “intense and deep” while it’s very easy to say “tastes like good wine”.  But I think that’s my point.  Regular wine drinkers don’t necessarily understand or relate to tasting notes like “unctuous”.  Maybe wine communication should use vocabulary more familiar to wine drinkers.  How would most drinkers react if the back of a bottle said “This is a French red wine and it tastes good and could use some food”?

Apology and shaking my fist at Stephen Colbert

I was going to post these word clouds later with a lot more analysis of Parker’s reviews.. I would also like to do word clouds of Parker’s ediotrial content (instead of straight up tasting notes) and even do some for other critics and journalists.  But Stephen Colbert recently beat me to the punch and I hate it when Stephen Colbert steals my ideas!!! 😀

I promise to talk about all of this in more depth and with more rigor if I get chosen to present at SXSW in Austin next year. The talk I suggested is about data analysis, reinterpretation, visual representation, infographics, and all sorts of other stuff that might help people in non-verbal jobs like wine communicate with the rest of the world online.

Thanks, Frankie.

Whenever you say what you pair the food with, my mouth starts to water.  You guys are doing it right!  Drinking this wine with goooood food.  The only time you have to put your glass down is to open another bottle! ;D

Do you ever get the feeling that wine critics are making up words or inventing fruit you’ve never heard of to describe wine?  This morning, I took a sidestep in my computer-generated wine reviews project.  Instead of generating whole reviews, I am now generating new words to describe wines.  Here is a list of words that the computer generated to describe O’Vineyards Trah Lah Lah 2008.  The hope is that they all sound vaguely real.

List of Computer Generated Wine Terms

• extremendously
• bracked
• erfect!
• O’wonder
• O’people
• disappeal
• commend
• Motherwise
• elsewhereas
• vraiments
• uncompliments
• cracket
• astounder
• disting
• uninspirits
• recomments
• curiositive
• tastinctive
• tremember
• rangerous
• astonight
• definish
• brilli
• nothink
• cours.
• massic
• changerous
• differench
• vinegativity
• extremember
• complemendously
• cherritory
• reminish
• measive
• gravinter
• recontaste
• Treal
• tong….
• complicious
• refunky
• greal
• perfectar
• Dangue
• mell
• superspecisitate
• charaction,
• afraisitate
• boood
• rephoune
• memememe
• whypecomplavound
• suppoottle

To spice things up, today I’m highlighting computer generated words rather than whole reviews. This means the n gram analysis focuses on letter pairs and letter triplets instead of word pairs and word triplets. If you have no idea what I’m talking about, refer to the simplified explanation in my first post about computer generated reviews.  Basically, the computer looks at what letters commonly appear together and it makes up words based on the statistical probability of random letters appearing near each other.

The list starts with words that strictly follow the analysis (high similarity to actual letter pairs in real reviews of Trah Lah Lah 2008) and it slowly descends into the bowels of vaguely human-sounding language (low similarity to actual letter pairs).  All capitalization and punctuation was generated by the algorithm.

Perhaps of special interest, the computer generated the word “commend” even though that never appeared in the reviews.  It also got a couple of real french words like “vraiment” and “cours”.

I definitely want to add some of these automatically generated words to my wine vocabulary.  I wonder how long it will be before somebody calls me out for using made-up words like vinegativity, mell and bood.

This wine is quite differench. Extremendously bracked attack. Midpalate is dominated by gravinter with some notes of refunky vinegativity. Mell with a measive finish that reminds me of cracket cherritory.

Haha, love hearing this sort of review.  Not only does John enjoy the wine, he disses the silly name, and he shared the bottle with friends!  That’s always the best news.  We like it when people like the wine.  We LOVE it when they share the wine with others!

O’Vineyards: pairs well with friendship.  That’s a great tagline … sort of has an alcoholic carebear vibe to it.

This is always nice to hear.  “It should cost more”.  I mean, it’s nice to hear delicious too!  But the fact is that our wines are really inexpensive in the UK.  Sometimes, if wine drinkers are very used to super market prices, they find O’Vineyards a little expensive.  But the fact is that wines of this quality take a lot of work, and they’d be far more expensive in most settings.  Naked Wines’ unique financing opportunities (they pay me long ahead of time, as I’m making the wine) allows me to bring wines to the UK market at much lower prices.

It’s great to hear a happy customer say our wines should be more expensive.  It means that our work with Naked (to bring the wines to the UK at the best values imaginable) is paying off!

Elin McCoy wrote her Bloomberg column about my UK importer Naked Wines, and her article uses a lot of my personal experiences with the company.

It’s a bit strange referring to Naked Wines as a wine importer.  The more I work with them, the more I realize they have many many roles in the wine trade.  Calling them a wine importer almost feels like I’m neglecting their role as retailers, financers, communicators, and innovators.  Some of the projects described in Elin’s article like the MarketPlace can’t be classified as a traditional ecommerce site.  Naked isn’t buying wine and then selling it.  They’re instead providing a platform where other people can sell their products like eBay or GroupOn.  If this project succeeds and draws enough attention, it could totally marginalize the import and retail side of the business.

Anyway, it’s always fun talking to journalists about Naked Wines because they’re constantly trying new things.  So every interview, there’s a slough of new questions and answers.  I never get bored! 😀

I met Elin last October at the European Wine Bloggers’ Conference and she got to taste some of my wines back then.

She had this section in her article about O’Vineyards:

Domaine O’Vineyards

Joe, Ryan, and Liz O’Connell at their winery Domaine O’ Vineyards in Cabardes, France. The O’Connells, from Florida, purchased the vineyard in 2004, and their cabernet-merlot blend Trah Lah Lah has won fans among Naked Wines’ Angels. Source: O’Vineyards via Bloomberg