Words
for wine
making
tasting notes more useful
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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