A real shelf, shot honestly. Mixed bottles — a bourbon next to a cheap red. One candle.
Must not show a rack, a cellar, or anything that implies a collection. The moment this looks aspirational we have lost Rey, and Rey is the volume. Phone camera is right; grain reads as somebody's actual Tuesday and a clean studio frame reads as stock.
Some of them are good. You couldn't say why.
Keep as many as you like. Scan the label, front and back, and it fills in what it can actually read.
It leaves the rest blank. An empty field is a better answer than a confident invention, and you'll be reading these back in five years.
Four bottles lifted out of the larger set. The unchosen ones still in frame, dimmed.
The shelf is still there — it just isn't the point tonight. Beside it, small and factual: a label being photographed front and back, the fields filling in, and one left blank. That blank field is the shot.
Wine · bourbon · tequila · rum · gin · vodka · beer · sake — each with its own fields, its own wheel, its own structure. A cast list is never the plot.
You poured them. You still don't know which is which — the order is hidden until everyone has committed.
Four glasses, numbered. The labels physically turned away.
A phone in frame showing Glass 1 · Glass 2 · Glass 3 · Glass 4 and nothing else. Must not read as a party trick — this is a discipline, and the spec bans the obvious word for it.
Put the code on the table. Your friends scan it and score on their own phones. No app, no account, no email.
You choose what they're asked. A quick evening is a score and a sentence. A serious one is the whole card — flavours, structure, the grape, and which of these bottles they think is in the glass.
A QR code on a table, four phones around it, each showing the same numbered glasses. Real hands.
Must not be devices floating on a gradient. This is the one photograph where the hands matter more than the screens.
Tap it — this is the live card
You both found it. Your answer, ringed in green — the only green on the wheel.
Only you found it. Kept as it was. Not a third kind of correct, and not a mistake either.
Known for it, and you missed it. No fill at all, ringed in ink. This is the one you'll remember.
Pick a few flavours. Then ask for the answer.
Told a wine is expensive, people score it higher. Reliably, and without knowing they're doing it. Your own earlier score anchors you harder still.
So the answer is hidden until you've committed. Then it shows you what you actually thought.
Reading "cherry, tobacco, leather" and agreeing is worth nothing. Writing down cherry and finding out it was tobacco and leather is how anybody learns to taste.
An evening doesn't go: taste six, then find out. It goes: pour one, argue about it, want to know.
Turn a glass over before you've scored it and the card says so. The score that follows isn't a blind one, and we're not going to pretend otherwise.
Every card, every glass, marked against what was actually in it.
| Taster | Glass | Grape | Price | Score |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Taster A | 1 | right | right | 91 |
| Taster A | 2 | wrong | right | 88 |
| Taster B | 1 | wrong | wrong | 79 |
| Taster B | 2 | wrong | wrong | 84 |
| Taster C | 1 | right | wrong | 93 |
| Taster C | 2 | right | right | 90 |
Your favourite was the cheapest bottle in the flight.
That line is an outcome, not a promise — it prints only if the evening produces it. Cast the flight with one genuinely cheap bottle in it and it usually does.
Eight voices. Pick one and it reads the scorecard back to the room.
This block is set at the size and leading the real recap will be printed at, so the typography can be judged before the words exist. The recap this replaces will be generated from the actual cards of the actual evening, and printed unedited. If it is not good enough to set at this size, that is the product telling us something and the page should not paper over it.
It can't change a number. The tallies are the real ones; the voice only decides how they're said.
Set here at the size, the leading and the measure the real piece will take. Real text, selectable, on the page's own ground — never a screenshot of writing.
A screenshot of writing says feature. Typeset writing says this is what you get.
The bottle comes out of the cellar. The evening goes into the book.
Every tasting is kept, not overwritten. Open the same wine in two years and find something else in it — that's not a mistake to correct, that's the whole reason to keep a cellar book.
The four bottles from beat 2, on the night.
The same four. Different date, different people.
The only shot needing a second evening. If that can't be scheduled, drop the photograph and print the two scorecards side by side instead — weaker to look at, stronger as evidence, and it is the actual claim.
Different people. Different order. Different room. The bottle is the occasion, never the point.