The Travails of Wine Communication

Sommelier and wine bar owner Cong Cong Bo has a nice article on the language of wine and its difficulties posted at Tim Atkin’s site.

The aforementioned complexities are also the source of commonly-used, but abstract terms such as “linear”, “mineral”, or “green”. Wines are further personified as “austere”, “poised”, “elegant”, and “pretty”. Wait. Are we still describing a beverage? In isolation, I find these descriptors unhelpful since they are so generic, and I feel no closer to imagining what the wine is like without some idea of flavour and texture. They also pose a certain ambiguity: does “green” suggest under-ripeness (negative) or herbaceous complexity (positive). Is a “pretty” wine simple, sacrificing depth of flavour for mass appeal, or is it simply delicious? Using a lot of words without conveying much meaning certainly makes wine people seem like pompous twats, or worse, politicians.

Indeed, words without context seldom supply meaning. A Chablis described as “austere” means one thing; a Cabernet Sauvignon under the same description is something else.

As she points out, the virtue of using the tasting grids from WSET or the Court of Master Sommeliers is that they provide a structured way of working through a wine so you end up with a complete picture.

Well, complete up to a point.

“Objective” wine descriptions cannot capture the individuality of a wine. Good wines have a distinct character; that is why we are willing to pay more for them. Describing a wine without describing what makes it distinct is a failure to communicate in contexts where distinctiveness matters. Yet is it devilishly difficult to do.

That is where the poetry comes in. To describe a wine as “effortlessly vulgar” or “like a cut-glass conversation” may sound pompous to the uninitiated but conveys meaning if accompanied by an account of why that sets a wine apart.

The secret to all effective communication is to know your audience. And there are many different audiences when it comes to wine communication.