What am I talking about? The shape of wine is the shape of the bottle or glass that it's in. But that is not the shape I'm talking about.
We are all guilty, I am sure, of eating food without savoring the taste and texture - simply swallowing it, especially if we are hungry. And then, sadly, food can sometimes be devoid of taste or texture. Texture, as in crunchy fresh vegetables or chewy meat is as much a part of the pleasure of eating as is flavor.
So it is with wine. We tend to drink wine instead of tasting it, especially if the wine is devoid of any character and serves solely to wash down the food. Savoring wine and food requires some concentration and therefore some periods of silence, however brief. If you carry on a non-stop dinner conversation you will probably only have a vague idea of what the food and wine were about.
Most of what we taste we recognize through our incredibly acute sense of smell. Our olfactory bulb can recognize thousands of molecules and their associations can be stored in the brain to be recalled years later in an instant. Our mouths, by contrast, are crude sensors capable of recognizing only sweet, sour, salty and bitter.
I long since stopped taking more than rudimentary, short-hand notes when I taste wine - even if I like the wine and buy it - because it takes too much time for me to accurately describe a wine in words, if it is at all possible. Wine is invariably described in terms of other commonly recognized flavors like for example cherries, but often the taste is familiar, but the metaphors (wet dog for example) may not immediately come to mind.
Nevertheless, I retain a clear image of most wines that impress me and I realized, some time ago, that part of that recollection has to do with a 3-D graphical representation - the shape of the wine in my mouth.
To my surprise, I have found that when I describe a wine, that someone is tasting, as vertical or horizontal, the person knows what I am talking about. It also is immediately apparent when you savor a wine of any complexity that the taste changes progressively from the front to the back of the mouth. So we have three dimensions, up and down, side-to-side, and front to back. We can describe a wine in three dimensions! It has shape! Try it!
I am reasonably sure that the vertical dimension is associated with acidity and the side-to-side with fruit or flavor. But why this should be I have no, idea. I would have thought that fruit, being associated with smell in our nasal passage would be vertical but I don't find it that way. An austere, acidic Sauvignon Blanc has an extremely narrow, very tall shape. A fruity flabby wine goes side-to-side with little depth. Some wines have the same shape front-to-back - they're usually boring. Some wines have a "hole" in the middle of the palate. They and the wines that end abruptly half-way back in the mouth are flawed. Some wines seem not to "touch" the sides of the mouth nor the roof, they seem to be concentrated in the center of the mouth from front to back.
Another mystery to me is why the taste of wine progresses from the front of the palate to the back. I can understand time-wise how more volatile components get to the olfactory bulb before the less volatile components and before those that are released as a result of some chemical reaction in the mouth. In a wine with an extremely long finish I can see how the flavor might appear to be coming from somewhere near my ears but is my mind playing tricks when what I smell is perceived to be a some coming from some precise point in my mouth?
Tannin and components like glycerin provide texture or "mouth feel" adding further to the shape of a wine. Tannin, especially, can be perceived as being in the front sides or back of the mouth; it can be aggressive at the gum line, astringent in the middle or back of the palate, or it can be warm and comfortable around the cheeks - even "dusty" in the upper back of the palate - a sure signature of Cabernet Franc.
Start drawing pictures of wines - and let me know what you "see"!