Objective & Subjective Traits in Wine

Whether the review comes from someone who gets paid to rate wine, from a friend, or you -- how you rate a wine is a combination of objective and subjective traits. Why is that important? Because objective notes will tell you if you will like a particular wine. Subjective traits will tell you if the reviewer liked the wine.

Objective - not influenced by personal opinion or beliefs:

• Clarity, brightness and color are basic traits from looking at a wine.
• Dry or sweet. This doesn't mean you'll like the dry or sweet wines.
• Faults like TCA (corked), oxidized, cooked/overheated, and Brettanomyces (barnyard, horsey smell).
• Fruit, acid, oak. Three main components of the flavor and other components like earth or mineral.

Subjective - based on personal feelings, tastes, opinions:

• What kind of fruit you're tasting. One taster's strawberries might be another's blueberry. 
• Other components. You might get a strong earthy component to, let's say, a Pinot Noir, but is it mushrooms, forest floor, or what?
• Structure and balance between the various components. The last bullet item in Objective is about fruit, acid, oak and other components in the wine. This is about whether or not they are in balance.
• Complexity and finish.

You could argue that some of these could cross over to the other and maybe be part subjective and part objective. Yeah, so that makes reading someone's review a bit more difficult when trying to decide if you'll like what they liked.