Minerality in Wine: Textual Analysis of Chablis Premier Cru Tasting Notes

Table 2

Bigram analysis of Chablis Premier Cru tasting notes in CellarTracker, where a “mineral,” “minerals,” “minerally,” or “minerality” word is the second word in the bigram.

Bigram group	First word^ab (number of occurrences)^c	Total occurrences
Stony minerality (Land)	chalk (220), ferrous (1), earth (8), flint (75), graphite (0), gravel (5), granite (1), gypsum (0), iron (1), kimmeridgian (3), lead (0), limestone (40), marl (0), pebble (1), rock (23), soil (1), slate (18), stone (196)	593
Saline minerality (Ocean)	brine (9), iodine (4), marine (5), ocean (11), oceanspray (0), saline (128), salt (76), saltwater (0), sea (13), seabreeze (0), seasalt (0), seashore (3), seaside (3), seaweed (3), seawater (0)	255
Seashell minerality (Ocean)	oyster (4), oystershell (2), seashell (27), shell (72), shellfish (0)	105
Smoky minerality (Smoke)	cabbage (0), cardboard (0), corn (0), egg (0), funk (0), fusil (0), gunflint (1), gunmetal (0), gunpowder (1), gunsmoke (1), lapsang (0), matchstick (0), reduction (5), rotten (0), rubber (0), smoke (34), skunk (0), struckmatch (0), sulphide (0), sulfide (0), sulfur (1), sulphur (1)	44

^aIncludes derivatives and common misspellings of the word type, for example, “chalky” and “chalkey”. ^bCategorisation of first-word types has been made in accordance with BIVB descriptions for minerality [40] with adjustment for “gun-” words (gunflint and gunpowder) which were moved to the smoke group. Seashell was separated from saline in order to test the work of Rodrigues et al. [19], though BIVB groups the two together into an “ocean” category. BIVB refers to the stony category described here as “land.” ^cWord types marked in bold highlight potential miscategorisations. Flint may be shorthand for gunflint and possibly considered smoky instead of stony; iron and ferrous could be confused with iodine and therefore considered saline rather than “land.” Given the number of occurrences involved, only the categorisation of “flint” is materially an issue (see Discussion). The overall order and magnitude of importance between the bigram groups would remain, however, even with these alternative categorisations. All wines were between 3 and 7 years of age when tasted.