Fondata Magazine – Visualising wine tasting data
“Seeking simplicity in statistics, complexity in wine, and everything else in fortune cookies”
Xiao-Li Meng is the Whipple V.N. Jones Professor of Statistics at Harvard University and the founding Editor-in-Chief of Harvard Data Science Review. When one of his students suggested combining wine and statistics, it set him (and his students) on a path on which they would learn far more than they could have possibly predicted.
I had the pleasure of creating a bespoke data visualisation for Fondata Magazine. During the project, I discovered the work and research of Professor Xiao-Li Meng, who combined wine and statistics. He presented his research during a series of wine tastings and statistical lectures with his students.
The visualisation was created from a table with nine figures, each representing a rating for a type of wine. I used a custom visual vocabulary to encode the data with tailored symbols. These symbols were arranged in three columns, with each symbol representing the mean rating given to a particular wine tasted in a specific order. The symbols feature an undulating circumference that denotes the value, with a more rounded shape for lower ratings and a spikier shape for higher values.
