Exploring Pinot Noir Through Data
By: Rachel Woods
Tags: Wine, Word2vec

Photo by Carson Masterson on Unsplash

Developing your understanding and palate to detect nuances in wines is a lifelong process. The industry of sommelier exams and competitions shows us as much. A single glass of wine holds an endless number of variables that one can experience, dissect, analyze and enjoy.

Possibly the most influential factor in a wine beyond its grapes (which is really just a nod at genetics) is where the wine comes from, its place. Bundled up in a wine’s place are climate, year to year growing season effects, tradition, style and influence. Some use the term terroir to designate the place where a wine comes from. At the end of the day, what really matters is how those variables relate to your personal preferences and palate.

That being said, the dissection of wine by place is a skill that can take a long time and a lot of practice to hone. Part of my goal with The Wine Nerd is to enable you to jump into learning about wine without the pretense and prerequisite knowledge; instead, we can learn from data. So that’s why I partnered up with a fellow wine blogger and Pinot noir lover, Renae (@passthepinot), to explore one of my favorite grapes — Pinot noir — through data. Renae wrote a fantastic commentary on the findings below here, but I recommend you read this part first. Let’s get started.

Why is pinot noir a great grape to study in relation to place?

Pinot noir is known to be a very influenceable grape due to its thin skin and light composition. Thus, even the most nuanced differences in growing seasons, winemaking processes, etc. are apparent in the wines.

Pinot noir is also a very common grape varietal. You will find it on most wine lists, and it typically takes up large sections of wine aisles and shops. Pinot noir comes predominantly from Oregon, California and Burgundy (France) with smaller but still significant and great Pinot noir coming from New Zealand, Washington, Australia, and more. The average price of a Pinot noir from the recent years of Wine Spectator Top 100 was approximately $45, with some of the most expensive pinots coming from France.

% of Wine Spectator Top 100 Pinot Noirs from Major Regions

Pinot noir also grows in quite different regions across the world, all with quite different climates. Here we look at the average monthly temperatures of some of the cities near popular Pinot noir regions (granted we’re missing all of the microclimate nuances here). Regions like Sonoma and Oregon have very large differences between winter and summer climates.

Average monthly temperature for major Pinot Noir growing regions

The stylistic differences in pinot noir also vary. We analyzed the technical sheets of 70 wines from a variety of regions and found that most pinot noir receives French oak treatment. The average percent new was 32%, with an 18% standard deviation — so that does vary quite a bit! The average ABV was 13.6% with a standard deviation of 0.5% and the average pH was 3.74 with a standard deviation of 0.5. So the boldness, alcohol level and acidity do vary. Some winemakers will let their wine go through partial or full malolactic fermentation, giving their wines more of a creamy texture. Some will also use whole cluster fermentation methods, which can add more structure, tannins and color.

So how do we start to understand the nuances between these regions when it comes to taste?

We gathered data from WineMag.com on 1180 pinot noirs, including region, price and description. After training a natural language processing model (word2vec), we can actually visualize how similar these wines are described and start to understand which are the most similar. At a high level, we transformed every word in our dataset of critic reviews of pinot noir into a numerical representation. From here we were able to add up these numbers per wine, then find an average amongst all wines from the area — resulting in a final numerical representation for the region. Yep, data is pretty cool!

A visual representation of Pinot Noir similarities by region

From above, we can see that regions like Sonoma and Napa/Sonoma are understandably similar. One thing that’s fascinating is that Willamette and Burgundy are so far apart in this numerical representation of the wines from those regions; however, people often compare the two regions or describe Oregon pinot noirs as having a “Burgundian style”. Now since this analysis is based on critic text reviews, I am not claiming this is absolute fact. Wine descriptions are really one of the most subjective things I know, but interesting nonetheless!

Now when we deep dive into each of these regions and look at the terms that are most unique and most frequently used, we start to see some really interesting patterns emerge.

Common terms used to describe each Pinot Noir

Regions on the western coast of the United States all lead with notes of cherry, while California has brighter descriptions than Willamette (chocolate, coffee, etc). Germany and Austria are both described as zesty. Burgundy with concentration and elegance.

I am curious to hear if others would agree with these distinctions that the data reveal! What do you think about pinot noir? What regions are most similar or dissimilar in your experience?

Next, read Renae’s commentary about the findings above: https://medium.com/the-wine-nerd/why-arent-we-saying-oregonian-style-and-other-thoughts-on-the-pinot-noir-data-gathered-by-the-db8adf4470b3