Tasting Circles
While preparing the exhibition of the collection of wine watercolours, Gabriel Cytal asked himself how to pictorially represent the olfactory and gustatory characteristics perceived during wine tasting.
To depict aromas, the artist first created a series of painting representing fruits, flowers, or spices, focusing on aromas characteristic of Beaujolais wines. The arrangement of these painting thus evokes the order in which aromas appear during a tasting and recalls the oenological classification of primary and secondary aromas.
Another of the artist’s pictorial explorations involves representing the tasting sensation in a less figurative way and within a single image. The circular shape is emblematic of each stage in the winemaking process: the grape berry, the vats, the press, the barrels, the bottles, and finally the glass. Everything is roundness or rotational movement, like the wine swirling in the glass during a tasting.
To draw the circles, Cytal drew inspiration from a Japanese meditation technique, the ENSO circle, meant to faithfully convey the state of mind of the person who draws it. The circle is made in a single stroke, in a single breath. After identifying a wine’s olfactory characteristics, the artist simply draws a circle with a calligrapher’s brush dipped in the wine: a light wine is represented by a finer trace, simultaneous aroma appearances by multiple strokes, and persistence by a more pronounced continuity of the line. Each circle drawn hence represents the olfactory signature of a wine during a tasting.
