The visual assessment comes first in most tasting disciplines, and the Color & Appearance section records it in the same order your eye works: the color itself, then clarity, then what the wine does on the glass. Everything here is selected, not typed — a palette grid, a few selects, and three sliders.
Primary Color
The primary color is chosen from a palette grid keyed to the wine’s type — a red wine offers reds (ruby, purple, garnet, tawny), a white offers whites, a rosé its own pinks and coppers, with sparkling, fortified, and unset wines drawing on broader combinations. Each color spans three vibrance columns — Pale, Medium, and Deep — so a single tap records both hue and depth. Tap a selected swatch again to deselect it.
Secondary Colors
Once a primary color is set, secondary colors open up: swatches for the supporting glints — the green edge on a young white, the brick note creeping into a mature red. Unlike the primary, you can select several, and they carry no vibrance — they are accents, not the body of the color.
Brightness and Clarity
A single field covers how the wine transmits light, on a scale from Brilliant through Clear and Slightly Hazy to Hazy and Cloudy. Haze is not automatically a fault — some deliberately unfiltered wines wear it openly — but if what you see suggests a defect, the Flaws & Defects editor is the place to say so.
Legs and Tearing
Swirl, and watch the tears form. Curate records them as three small sliders rather than one vague impression:
Quantity — from few to many
Speed — from slow to fast
Width — from thin to thick
Legs speak mostly to alcohol and sugar, not quality; recording all three dimensions keeps the observation honest.
Sediment
Detail levels — Appears in Standard and Advanced notes.
How much solid matter the glass shows, from None through Minor (fine particles) and Significant to Plentiful and Abundant. Sediment in a mature red or an unfined wine is expected company; the point is to note it, not to judge it.
Rim Variation
Detail levels — Appears in Advanced notes.
The difference in color between the wine’s core and its rim — Little to None, Moderate, or Pronounced. A wide, paling rim is one of the classic visual cues of age, which is why it sits at the Advanced level with the other evaluation-grade observations.
Staining
Detail levels — Appears in Advanced notes, for red wines.
Whether the wine stains the glass as it moves — None, Light, Medium, or Heavy — a rough proxy for pigment extraction. The field appears only when the wine attached to the note is a red, since staining is not a meaningful observation elsewhere.
Where This Fits
The three legs sliders and the color grid all answer to Quick Selections on the summary card; the full set lives in the Editor Panel’s Color + Appearance section. The section’s coverage segment fills as you record — see How the Tasting Note Builder Works for the mechanics, and Choosing a Detail Level if you find yourself wanting rim variation in a Standard note — that is the signal to start your next note at Advanced.