Describing wine often has a whiff of condescension over a robust layer of barnyard byproduct. The adjectives seem to be the fruit of over-ripe imaginations: When I hear “muscular,” “tight,” “rakish,” I don’t know whether the critic is talking about wine or Brad Pitt.
“Perfectly integrated” is how I’d describe my son’s multi-racial nursery school; and “legendary concentration” is what I need to figure out my income tax. However, “opulent” is a legitimate wine descriptor–it usually refers to the price.
“It just smells like wine to me,” a friend said when pressed to describe the wine we were sharing. She isn’t alone: Beyond a few basic adjectives, most people have difficulty describing how a wine smells and tastes. Indeed, the first time I listened to two wine-loving friends discuss a merlot, I thought they were speaking an ancient tribal language. They reminded me of a James Thurber cartoon showing one drinker commenting to others: “It’s a naive domestic Burgundy without any breeding, but I think you’ll be amused by its presumption.”
Fine wine certainly deserves more than prosaic description. In fact, if we could reduce wine’s essence to precise words, it probably wouldn’t be so enjoyable.
But wine writing continues to evolve into ever-more esoteric language that seems far removed from the actual experience of smelling and tasting wine. (I’ve never smelled lantana, the evergreen shrub one writer insisted he found in Australian shiraz.) What could be prompting this purple prose? The thousands of new wines that all require descriptive differentiation? Are critics looking to secure their niches through obscure comparisons that no one can question? Is this a way of getting more cash for vin ordinaire?
A way with words
Adrienne Lehrer, professor emerita of linguistics at the University of Arizona, has been studying this topic for 20 years. According to her report “Trends in Wine and Trendy Words,” wine description is getting more precise and intense. A wine today isn’t simply balanced, it’s “integrated” or “focused.” In contrast, an unbalanced wine is “muddled” or “diffuse.” A full-bodied wine is now “chunky” and “big-boned”; a light-bodied wine “svelte” and “sleek.”
“I’m interested in this from a linguistic point of view, because wine writers are pushing the language and making up metaphors,” Lehrer says. “When critics try to describe 30 Californian chardonnays, they often find the wines are similar–but it would be boring to read the same old thing all the time. So they jazz up the description to keep readers engaged.”
While compiling her glossary of frequently used wine adjectives, Lehrer discovered that the high-growth tasting terms include “barnyard funk,” “transcendental,” “intellectual” and “diplomatic.”
” ‘Funky’ was used a lot,” she says. “I don’t know whether it has any specific meaning that’s different from the way that it’s used elsewhere.”
Lehrer thinks the new generation of wine drinkers is trying to make wine talk less intimidating and more relevant by including pop culture references. Wine X magazine (or rather ‘zine) “provides a new voice for a new generation of wine consumers.” For one California cabernet, we are asked to “imagine Naomi Campbell in latex.” An Australian shiraz is a “Chippendales dancer in leather chaps–tight, full-bodied and ready for action.” A New Zealand cabernet-merlot is like “a Victoria’s Secret fire sale–smoky charred wood, leather, spicy and very seductive.”
But you can go too far in that direction too, he says: “I’ve never tasted or smelled Naomi Campbell in latex.”
Even the U.S. critic Robert Parker has contributed phrases such as “amazingly infantile” and “packed with plenty of jammy, laser-guided fruit.” The topper, though, has to be English satirist Ralph Steadman’s description of an Algerian wine: “Very soft and very round, like sheep’s eyes with square pupils. The hint of promise got steeper and sparser yet and it began to taste like dull pewter covered in dust, and cobwebs stuck to the roof of my mouth.”
Making it mean something
Attempts have been made to standardize wine tasting vocabulary. The accepted template is now the aroma wheel, developed in the early 1980s by Ann Noble, professor of oenology and viticulture at the University of California, Davis. The inner circle of its concentric rings note the most basic adjectives, such as “fruity” and “floral,” while the subdivided middle and outer rings provide more descriptive terms such as “grapefruit,” “strawberry jam” and “asparagus.”
But wait. Isn’t wine made from grapes rather than asparagus or grapefruit?
Well, there is some sense behind this descriptive noble rot. The molecular structures of wine are similar to those found in fruit, flowers, vegetables — and even in spoilage factors such as “wet dog.”
For example, scientists have identified the chemical compound methoxypyrazine in aged sauvignon blanc, which has a canned asparagus aroma. That compound is also found in high concentration in–you guessed it–canned asparagus.
Of all our senses, smell is the most overlooked, perhaps because we no longer have to hunt for our meals or worry about poisonous plants. Yet for all that, we have only four genes for vision but 1,000 genes for smell. We can detect just five basic tastes but more than 2,000 aromas. While input from the other senses must go to the hypothalamus and then on to the cortex for further analysis, smells go directly to the areas of the brain responsible for emotions and memories.
That’s why our memories often make bizarre connections. During one wine class, a student said that the wine reminded her of the Dallas airport. That made some obscure sense: We were tasting rieslings, and when aged, they do tend to have a smell akin to airplane fuel. Another student said a chardonnay reminded her of her son’s gerbil cage. The oak-aged wine evoked the pine shavings in the cage. Yet another thought the gewurztraminer was like her grandmother’s heavily spiced Christmas ham.
The good news is that most of us can recognize a far wider range of aromas and flavors than we believe. It takes a little concentration, and lots of practice. It also means paying attention to everyday smells, which is easy to do: Just smell the grapefruit before you put it in the grocery cart.
The goal of democratic wine description is to develop a common vocabulary. It shouldn’t be used to create a caste system that sets apart those in the know from those drinking margaritas for fear of looking foolish.
But enough wine-speak. Time to quit talking and start tasting–perhaps a strong, silent type that isn’t too intellectual.
