The Look of Wine: Reading Wine Color

An invigorating guide for tasting, naming, and visualizing the chromatic diversity of wine

While smell and taste dominate the experience of sipping wine, Florence de La Riviére turns our eyes to its color, instead inspiring an artistic and visual approach to wine tasting. Throughout The Look of Wine, readers will meet winegrowers, oenologists, sommeliers, and scientists to weave a canvas of universal words representing the chromatic palette of wines. Alongside this descriptive vocabulary, original photography captures the authenticity of color while leaving room for interpretation. Each family of color is visually represented by a wine, with a description of its hues and the natural and human processes that contributed to creating it. Neither a directory of the colors of wine nor a technical encyclopedia, The Look of Wine is a living tribute to oenology’s chromatic diversity, with a focus on still, unmutated whites and reds, as well as rosés.

Florence de La Rivière is a colorist designer. Color has always been a key to enter her universe, threading a path from interior decoration to research activities. With her lectures on the colors of wine at Bordeaux’s faculty of oenology, she has fully restored the place of visual tasting. Florence has also done consulting work on colors for several renowned Bordeaux winemakers. Jérôme Bryon is a photographer. Trained as an architect, he plays with lines and scales to transfigure an ordinary environment. By making visible the invisible, he sublimates the raw material. This book responds to his thirst for challenges, adventures, and encounters. Jérôme has been represented since 2011 in Paris and Brussels by Galerie La Forest Divonne and was selected for Paris Photo 2020. Bénédicte Bortoli is a publisher, author of books on gastronomy and arts, as well as craftsmanship. Trained in gastronomy and oenology, she is a copywriter for many chefs and acted as manager of a wine guide for nine years. Bénédicte has experienced the demanding day-to-day rigor of Michelin-starred brigades before leading the culinary branch of a Parisian event venue.