Coming soon · New book
The Shape of Flavour
A holistic way of thinking about wine
Can a picture tell us more about a wine than a thousand words?
Traditional tasting notes are excellent at identifying a wine’s individual characteristics, but less effective at conveying the full sensory experience. Two wines may share almost identical lists of aromas and structural descriptors yet feel completely different.
The Shape of Flavour introduces a new visual framework for capturing that difference. Drawing on sensory science, visual art and years of teaching advanced wine students, Sarah Heller MW explores how flavour can be represented as a distinctive shape — one that makes the relationships between a wine’s many sensory dimensions easier to understand, remember and communicate.
Written for advanced wine students, professionals and serious enthusiasts of Italian wine, the book offers a complementary approach to conventional tasting that can sharpen blind tasting skills while helping us communicate wine in more evocative, intuitive terms.
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Flavour has a shape
Some wines are broad and enveloping, others narrow and linear. Some are highly structured but transparent, while others are both rigid and opaque.
These distinctions are often missed by conventional tasting systems. The Shape of Flavour makes the relationships between a wine’s sensory dimensions visible, helping us capture its overall character.
About the book
A new perspective on tasting wine
The Shape of Flavour brings together both analytical tasting and a holistic, visual framework. The book has three parts:
- The VIA tasting system — the systematic approach used for the Vinitaly International Academy, designed to capture the distinctive traits of Italian wines.
- The Shape of Flavour framework — Five dimensions (Outline, Flavor Hue, Transparency, Aroma Scale and Composition) that define a wine’s overall sensory character.
- Italian grape varieties — Italy’s native grapes categorised by shape, revealing similarities and differences that conventional systems may overlook.
Together, these approaches help sharpen blind tasting, strengthen sensory memory and make wine descriptions both more precise and more evocative.
Full contents and pre-order information will be announced closer to launch.