The Right Way to Describe a Wine

Robert Joseph asks Can We Ever Develop a Universal Language of Wine?

The short answer is no.

The language needed to convey what a wine tastes like to causal consumers would not be helpful at all to sommeliers trying to describe a wine to each other. Joseph does a nice job of pointing out how contextual our understanding of wine language is. Most Americans don’t know what a “gooseberry” flavor is. On the other hand,

…fruit and vegetable descriptors traditionally used by Europeans and Anglo Saxons are often meaningless to people in ‘developing’ wine nations in Asia and Africa who, for example, may never have encountered a redcurrant.

But the problem goes beyond the fact that people with different experiences will have different ways of describing them. There is something hopeless about the enterprise:

The brilliant line that writing about music is like ‘dancing about architecture’ is usually misattributed to Frank Zappa or Elvis Costello but was probably coined by the less illustrious Martin Mull. Whoever came up with those words, however, might equally well have applied them to art or wine writing.

Indeed. Art and wine are about having sensations and sensations are notoriously hard to describe in part because, unless you’re in the sensation business, there isn’t much point to describing them. They won’t save your life or earn your keep.

Yet describe them we must. Communities depend on relationships; relationships depend on conversations; and conversations depend on words that convey experiences. Without a wine vocabulary, with all its subjectivity and context dependence, there would be no wine community and our enjoyment of wine would surely suffer.

The best we can do is to continue to invent new ways of describing wine, hoping that some of it will catch on, and strive to know your audience and speak appropriately.

The only “right way to describe a wine” is one your audience will understand.