If Wine is Poetry in a Glass, Then Writing About It Must Be Poetry on the Page

Wine resists language. It slips through the mesh of vocabulary, defying even the most finely woven nets of metaphor, reference, and sensory notation. We reach for terms like “cassis,” “bacon fat,” or “crushed violets,” not because they pin the thing down, but because they’re what we’ve got—signposts gesturing toward an experience that remains, at its core, ineffable. You cannot say what a wine is. You can only evoke what it does.

And what it does, when it’s doing it well, is express. A good wine does not simply taste of things—it says something. It shimmers with personality, moves with a rhythm, unfolds like a scene. Its pleasure is not reducible to a flavor wheel or list of descriptors. When we write about wine, what we’re trying to capture is this expressive character—its mood, its gesture, its affective charge. We are not offering a chemical analysis (leave that to the lab), nor a field guide to aromas. We are translating a complex, embodied event into words, and that’s a task closer to lyric than lexicon.

This is why we should be wary of those who would police the language of wine. The recent insistence on neutral, codified vocabulary—flavored by the urge for inclusivity but seasoned with a dash of gatekeeping—risks stripping wine of its weird, generative energy. Yes, some past metaphors were absurd or offensive. Yes, we should be thoughtful about the cultural baggage our words carry. But to flatten wine language into standardized descriptors is to misunderstand the very nature of the experience it seeks to evoke.

Wine is not a specimen to be catalogued. It is a conversation, a seduction, a mood swing. It can be aloof or flirtatious, brooding or jubilant. It can rise like a soprano or hum like an idling engine. To capture this, we need the whole arsenal of human expression: metaphor, analogy, personification, nonsense, desire. Let it be baroque. Let it be awkward. Let it be embarrassingly florid. If wine is poetry in a glass, then writing about it must risk being poetry on the page.

Let a thousand flowers bloom. Let someone find oyster shell and someone else find heartbreak. Let one writer wax rhapsodic about Sydney Sweeney and another compare a wine to a busted radiator in February. Not all of it will land. Some of it will be silly, pretentious, even cringe-inducing. But the alternative is far worse: a sanitized, pseudo-objective language that drains wine of its life, its play, its provocations.

To write about wine is to dance about fermentation. It will never quite work, but when done well, it gets close—not to accuracy, but to expression. And wine is about expression.