I was at a cocktail party, trapped in the corner by a man to whom I’d just been introduced.
“So you write about wine, eh?” His tone already sounded a bit belligerent as he wagged his half-filled glass of Chardonnay at me. “Why don’t you write something about the kind of language you people use.”
“Excuse me?”
“You know, all that jargon about cherries and berries, lime peel and coconut and gooseberries.” He gave a guttural grunt of disgust that sounded a bit like a spoon caught in the garbage disposal. “What the hell is a gooseberry anyway?”
“Well…”
“And wet stones!” he barged on. “I love that one! I mean, have you ever actually licked a stone–wet or dry?”
“Um…”
“Exactly! Why doesn’t anyone write about this incomprehensible nonsense?”
At about this point in our one-sided conversation, another guest came to my rescue and I was able to slip away from my interlocutor. But I have been thinking about what he said, and if he’d given me the opportunity I might have pointed out to him that, in fact, plenty of people have written about this very thing. There is endless prose out there poking well-deserved fun at the often overly earnest and, yes, he’s right, sometimes incomprehensible language we critics resort to as we grapple with analogy to describe a subject that really doesn’t have a common language of its own. There are countless apps and innumerable blogs devoted to wine humor, wine snobbery, or wine satire, most of them taking a jab at the language that professional critics use in their descriptions of wine. There are books galore on the subject, the best of the current bunch surely being Been Doon So Long, by the zany and eloquent vintner Randall Grahm, founder of Bonny Doon Vineyards.
I know a man who, many years ago, included a chapter on wine jargon in a book that otherwise had nothing at all to do with wine (Ask Your Mother and Other Impossible Situations, by Thomas Trowbridge, William Morrow, 1990). The chapter in question is devoted, tongue-in-cheek, to the author’s alleged visit to a wine shop after his wife asks him to pick up a bottle of wine to go with the cut of beef she’s making for dinner. When he arrives at the store, Trowbridge writes, the salesperson begins describing some of the wines.
“One was ‘big, voluptuous and seductive’; another was ‘soft, elegant and rich’; still another was ‘young and clean.’ All in all, though, he [the salesman] preferred one that was ‘mature and generous, with good body.’ Something funny was going on. I began to wonder: is this guy selling wine or running a dating service? I really didn’t wait to find out. As he continued with ‘stylish, lightly perfumed, supple,’ and mumbled something about ‘nose’ and ‘legs’ I slowly backed out of the store.
Once outside I called my wife and told her to freeze the beef and whip up some curry. I picked up a six-pack on the way home.”
For vintners, the job of making wine involves one part science, one part artistry. Writing about it involves the ability to condense together a few facts and figures interspersed with metaphor, simile, and at least a modicum of technological understanding (it helps, for example, to have a general idea what the process of malolactic fermentation is all about). There are unquestionably certain universal standards for assessing wine quality, and experience is essential to professional wine evaluation, but tasting wine will always be a subjective experience. One of the goals of those of us who write about it is to shed enough light on wines that you, the consumer, may not be familiar with, in the hopes of enticing you to buy a bottle or two on the way home instead of invariably picking up that six-pack. My colleagues and I here at Wine Review Online are all passionate about wine–we live for it, talk about it, and, of course, drink probably way to much of it–and we hope to share our passion (okay, obsession) with you. Alas, sometimes the message gets bogged down in the gobbledygook.
Oh yes, about those gooseberries. Much wine criticism, here in America, was inspired by the Brits–they do eat gooseberries, while any American who hasn’t spent much time in Europe is mostly clueless. As for wet stones, I confess that professional curiosity has compelled me once or twice to actually lick a damp river rock. What does it taste like? Well, to be honest, not much. But since I can think of no other simile to convey that particularly mysterious and delicious quality that some wines (especially whites) possess, I’ll continue to talk about wet stones and hope you have some idea what I mean. And by the way, there’s nothing that sounds better to me right now than a glass of big, voluptuous and seductive wine.
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