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Words
for wine One of the
perennial frustrations of writing about wine is the poverty of
language we have to describe taste and smell, and the difficulty of
communicating what we experience as flavour with these relatively
blunt tools of words on a page. Pick up a wine
publication and read some of the tasting notes. How useful are these
to you? Do you recognize the wine that is being described? Does the
author’s experience resonate with you such that you can imagine you
are there drinking a glass with them? I have to admit that this
isn’t usually the case for me. I’ve recently
been thinking a great deal about how we use words to describe wine,
usually in the form of a tasting note. How can I make my writing more
useful to those of you who bother to read it? How can I give you the
information you want about the wines I’m tasting in a way that is
interesting, relevant and good to read? In communicating
about wine, we are assuming a degree of commonality of experience.
That is, when you and I sit down together and drink a bottle of wine,
we are to some extent experiencing the same thing. Without this shared
perception, then the whole venture of writing about wine is a futile
one. Of course, some
sceptics would argue that this is the case, their stance fuelled by
evidence from the scientific study of flavour that people do differ
quite significantly in their taste receptor sensitivity, and likely
have different arrays of olfactory receptors. But when I write about
how wines taste, I’m making an assumption that you and I have enough
in common as we sip and slurp that what I experience is going to be
relevant to you as well. I’d add that it’s likely that for some
readers there will be greater resonance than others, not just for
biological reasons, but also cultural factors which are very strong. Let’s compare the
senses of vision and flavour (I’m using ‘flavour’ here in
preference to ‘taste’ and ‘smell’, because these two senses
are integrated to such an extent in the brain that the distinction
between them is functionally rather irrelevant). The power of
narrative is that a writer can describe a scene in such away that in
our imaginations we can picture it for ourselves, often in a profound
way. I can describe my house or my cat or my car to you in ways in
which you can construct your own internal picture of them. But take a
distinctive flavour like coriander leaves. No matter how much I try to
imagine their flavour in my mind, I can’t put together an internal
mental construction of them. Flavour seems to operate at a very
different level in that when we are given a description of a taste or
smell, we can’t build this up in our mind in such a way that we can
relish or appreciate the flavour, no matter how good the description
is. This is the primary
difficulty with writing about wine. Verbal descriptions are imprecise
and largely fail to evoke an imagined flavour on the part of a reader.
This is why I’m increasingly moving away from descriptions that
simply attempt to identify all the different smells and tastes in a
particular wine, especially if the writer is more concerned with
writing a pretty sounding tasting note blending in exotic fruits and
weird spices in order to sound appropriately sophisticated. I’m concerned
with writing notes that have utility for my readers, that will help
them get an idea about what I really thought about the wine and why.
Yes, I'll continue to use descriptors, but I’ll keep these within
the realm of people’s normal experience. And I’ll use both my
numerical and verbal scoring systems to give you a good idea of how I
rank the wine with its peers, as long as you promise not to take the
scores too seriously and you read the note as well. I also promise to
remember who I am writing for (consumers, not the people who make,
sell or market the wines), and to be appropriately critical. Still
there remain wine writers who are too cowardly to say bad things about
wines that deserve it, and seem to like every wine they ever
encounter. They are not serving their readers well. Words about wine
are worthwhile, but it is a challenge to use words in such a way that
communicates useful information about the subtle and complex flavours
encountered in a good wine. The philosophy of wine
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