How to Speak Wine Speak

One of the more important issues related to aesthetics that the wine industry must solve is the question of wine language. Almost everyone is unhappy with tasting notes. Even when well written and supported by tasting expertise they draw complaints about being inaccessible or pompous. Yet tasting notes are necessary if we are going to be able to communicate about what we’re tasting. The question is what form should they take.

There are really two issues here and its important to keep them separate. One issue has to do with the way wine professionals communicate with each other; the second concerns the way wine professionals communicate with the wine drinking public.

The wine industry is becoming more and more diverse as people from across the globe discover wine and aspire to find jobs within the industry. The problem is that the flavor and aroma references that one has to learn to become a wine professional are all based on foods and flowers, common to Europe and the U.S., that may not be familiar to people from other cultures. As Jeannie Cho Lee (MW) writes:

Take Cabernet Sauvignon for example: instead of using blackcurrants, why shouldn’t we think about Chinese dates, either in dried or fresh form? When I ask a Hong Kong-based wine student how many times they have come across blackcurrants, the most common response is ‘never’ whereas with red dates, it is ‘every week’. We are blessed to have a wealth of wonderful ingredients at our disposal – consider dragon fruit, longan, lemongrass, persimmons, wolfberries, star fruit, rose apples, waxberries and mangosteens. Why think about bacon when we have char siu? Why not egg tart instead of English biscuits? What about seaweed for minerality in white wines?

Part of the solution is to increase diversity within the wine world creating a market for culturally-specific wine lexicons. That means we will not have a common language to speak about wine across cultures. Does that matter? Perhaps not. And some cross-seeding of wine vocabularies among cultures might be a good thing. Chinese dates may turn out to be a more accurate reference than blackcurrants for describing some Cabernet Sauvignon.

The second issue, how to communicate with non-experts about wine, raises a different set of questions. The problem is not exclusively about language. Many people complain that the aroma and flavor references we use in tasting notes are inaccessible. But these are not particularly arcane as long as we stick to the familiar examples. Most of them can be found in your spice cabinet or fruit bowl. The problem is that without training it is difficult to recognize these aromas, even the familiar ones. Likening wines to personality traits, songs, or other cultural references might help in particular cases but not everyone shares cultural references and picking up on analogies to personality traits still requires an ability to unpack the various dimensions of a wine on which the comparison depends.

We could of course, decline to describe wines to non-experts but that is likely to backfire. We want to encourage people to become wine enthusiasts. If we decline to describe what a wine tastes like or fail to convey the complexity of wine, we aren’t giving new consumers the hook that will get them interested in wine. Wine is interesting because of its complexities and variations. If we want people to pursue an interest in wine we need to give them a way into those complexities and variations.

The best suggestion I have heard to help non-experts cope with the complexity of wine is to encourage them to use their own vocabularies and references. Unless they aspire to learn the professional vocabulary they have no reason to be concerned about whether their way of understanding wine conforms to accepted wine education standards. There is a lot of enjoyment to be had making up your own flavor references and sharing them with friends, and by doing so they will be learning about wine. It’s the attention to detail and attempts to conceptualize what one is tasting that teaches us about wine. That doesn’t require an “official” vocabulary.

If you want to dig into these issues in more detail, this video by wine writer Meg Maker at Terroir Review is an excellent resource.

https://vimeo.com/905283896