An artist’s palate

When portrait painter and inventor Johnny Jonas said he was working on a ‘wine recognition system’, that would enable wine flavours to be depicted pictorially, Jonathan Goodall just had to find out more…

The incomparably named Johnny Jonas, portrait painter and inventor, has painted the pillars of our society: the Queen Mother, Sir Geoffrey Howe, Field Marshal the Lord Vincent GBE, KCB, DSO and my cousin Caroline. Between brushstrokes, he told her he was working on a “wine recognition system” to show the flavour of wine through graphical representation, to paint its portrait, so to speak. When she told him about me, he made contact and we spent an edifying morning in my kitchen with a sketchpad and a few bottles of red.
Now, before you turn the page, I implore you to keep an open mind and remember how many innovation forums you’ve attended. It’s not as though Jonas is claiming anything outlandish, like the same wine tasting different out of different shaped glasses, for example…
Jonas’s wine portraits look rather Picasso-esque and would grace any wine label; and wine producers, as we know, have a long tradition of harnessing the power of art on their labels, Mouton Rothschild and Taittinger being the most prominent.
“It’s worth noting the move in current wine label design towards the featuring of contemporary graphics and creative artwork, and the introduction of wine portraits fits well with this style of presentation,” says Jonas.

How it works
The main components of his portraits are the “flavour wave”, which moves from left to right, and various indices to show qualities such as acidity, tannins and length marked at different points along their length (see illustrations). The strength of the bouquet is shown by a rising sun symbol and the shape of the label itself shows whether the wine is soft and rounded or crisp and sharp. The widely recognised “flavour wheel” is incorporated within the design.

We’ve already seen various numerical scales, usually from one to five, showing the sweetness/ dryness of wines. Jonas’s “wine recognition system”, which is patented with full international protection, simply takes the concept of graphical representation and develops it to the nth degree. You might think it too ambitious and too complex, trying to incorporate too much information, and I, for one, tend towards the less-is-more camp with this kind of thing. Perhaps a simplified version might be the way forward. But this is merely a question of degree. The basic premise that flavour can be shown in graphical form is sound.
It’s called synaesthesia when we experience a sensation normally associated with a different sense. Perhaps the simplest example would be music evoking a mood or colour. I guess that’s why they call it the blues, as Dame Elton might say. With Braille we can feel words, we can write musical notes on sheets of paper, and we have all tasted fear and success. Neuro-linguistic programming requires patients to visualise their emotions as colours and shapes to better enable them to deal with them. Our senses can, and do, cross over and interact.
If we step back from the woods so we can see the trees, isn’t wine-speak pretty impenetrable? Cat’s pee on a gooseberry bush, anyone? Sweaty saddles? Wheelbarrows of ugli fruit? Are Jonas’s visual depictions any more absurd than talking about a wine’s nose or legs or its “cheeky personality”?  
“My mate at Berry Bros told me wine is all about fantasy,” says Jonas. “I said to him, ‘Let’s just try to draw the shape, the flavour wave, of the wine we’re drinking’, and he and I drew exactly the same dome shape. We could both see in the abstract. Friends of mine say my system is too complicated but when they try it they can do it and it’s amazing how similar their drawings are. That’s what convinced me.”

Whether or not Jonas’s concept has marketing potential, it would at least provide an alternative to that tedious “what wine am I?” game at wine trade dinners. All you need is a bottle of wine, a napkin, a pen and a little imagination.
And, yes, in case you were wondering, in our blind tasting/ drawing session at home, our wine portraits were uncannily similar.

Target market
Jonas concedes that wine buffs would probably be brushed up the wrong way by his wine portraits, which is why they’re aimed squarely at the I-know-what-I-likers. “One of the most overheard comments among wine drinkers is ‘I don’t know much about wine but I know what I like’. And yet, having found ‘what they like’ at a party or from a wine merchant, how do they easily find a match with very similar characteristics without having to read the lengthy and confusing descriptions on bottle labels? With wine portraits they would be able to identify the styles of wine they like anywhere in world – without needing to speak the language,” says Jonas.
Like the innovation this industry craves, isn’t anything that gets people talking about wine – or even drawing it – “a good thing”? And 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.

 © db May 2008