Tag Archives: wine tasting

Tasting Vitality: The Basic Features of Wine in Motion

22 Wednesday Jan 2020

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wine in motionI’m working on developing a tasting model that elevates a wine’s rhythm and motion on the palate, giving them equal billing with aromas. The justification for developing such a model is that a wine’s perceived movement on the palate is not only one determinant of wine quality but is central to a wine’s personality. Distinctive wines have a distinctive manner in which their tactile qualities unfold. Yet, our way of describing these features is not nearly as well developed as our description of flavor and aroma notes.

In an earlier post I explained how a wine’s structure is central to how it unfolds. In this post I begin to describe the basic form and sequence of that unfolding.

When we taste a wine, we experience it as moving through stages on the palate. The initial impression is of fruitiness and weight, although wines from cooler regions may exhibit earth and herbal flavors that are nearly as dominant as the perceptions of “fruitiness”. We then begin to sense the tactile impressions caused by acidity which often lightens the perceived weight of the wine and adds some tartness to the fruit and a sharp bite to the mouthfeel. Meanwhile we begin to sense the dryness and graininess of the tannins. [This is true of white wines as well but to a lesser degree] The point at which we perceive fruit and associated flavors, acidity, and tannins beginning to influence each other marks the midpalate, which can be broken into further segments if necessary–the front of the midpalate or back of the midpalate—in order to describe the wine’s movement. At midpalate, the wine seems to be expanding, gaining both a physical sensation of depth and breadth and a sense of increasing sharpness. (The sharpness may be muted in wines that lack acidity) After swallowing, the fruitiness and perceptions of weight gradually recede, the perception of dryness from the tannins and sharpness from the acidity become more prominent and then fade.

These transformations on the palate are for the most part universal and should seem quite familiar. All properly made red and white wines exhibit some version of this basic pattern. (Sparkling wine and fortified wines have additional features which I am ignoring for now)

Aside from specific aromas and flavors, what distinguishes one wine from another? Wines differ regarding how prominent or recessive these structural components are, how that relative prominence shifts as we taste the wine, how quickly these changes occur, and what the range of these changes are. (By “range” I mean the how widely divergent from a set point the effect is. For instance, does the sharpness from the acidity show continuity as the wine unfolds or does it increase or decrease?)

While these changes are occurring, each component is influencing the other components, changing their character and relative prominence. For instance, as we perceive more prominent acidity, that will affect the quality and relative prominence of the fruit compared to other components. As the wine evolves in the mouth these components expand and contract, jostling for our attention, their relative degrees of prominence fluctuating with differing degrees of duration and acceleration. One important question to answer is whether these changes influence wine quality and how do they do so.

At this point, I need to introduce some of the technical vocabulary that will help us understand this dimension of wine tasting. We can summarize the above by pointing to general features of any process—the perceived movement of the structural components of wine exhibit velocity, acceleration, duration, and force. For wine tasting, in particular, we must add the frequency, amplitude, and continuity of variations as a central feature of movement on the palate. By “frequency” I mean how often they occur. By “amplitude”, I mean how large the effect is. By “continuity” I mean how persistent the effect is between stages. These general features of processes influence the perceived changes the wine undergoes. We experience a wine as expanding or contracting. We sense changes in the relative intensity of the various structural components. Wines seem to change their shape, from round to angular for instance, as the tasting experience unfolds. Wines exhibit tension, release, direction, resolution and finesse because of these general features of processes.

Thus, as analytic tasters we might ask the following sorts of questions: As the acidity becomes more prominent at midpalate, what happens to the fruit and how is it interacting with the aromas and flavors? What is that activity doing to our attentional focus? What is gaining in intensity and what is diminishing as the perceived acidity increases or the tannins emerge? What is happening to the velocity of these changes? How do these affect our overall impression of the wine?

In the next post in this series, I will discuss how to measure and express these dimensions of a wine.

The Meaning of Wine Scores

13 Monday Jan 2020

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bottles on a shelfWine statistics guru David Morrison wades into the issue of wine scores. Despite their alleged usefulness as a marketing tool, he finds them fundamentally misleading because they falsely imply the score serves some precise mathematical purpose.

My point here is that if quality scores are adjectives then they should not be treated as numbers, because the only purpose of numbers is their mathematical properties, not their linguistic ones….
For my purpose here, the pertinent issue is the idea that the the numbers express more than merely rank order. We expect that a score of 90 is better than a score of 89 — their rank order should mean something. But we do not know how much better a 90 wine is than an 89, nor do we know what criteria were used to decide on this difference. So, the quantitative difference has no explicit meaning.

I agree with David that scores are often interpreted as having some mathematical meaning as well as the precision that mathematics enables. I also agree that wine scores could not possibly have a mathematical meaning or express precision since there are no precise criteria for assigning scores.

But I disagree that the score is useless.

For me a wine score is a measure of something. When tasting under optimum conditions, how much aesthetic enjoyment did I get from this wine compared to other wines I’ve tasted under similar conditions? A wine score is a measure of aesthetic response. By “aesthetic response” I don’t mean only sensory pleasure. A wine could be difficult but interesting or distinctive. Such a wine to me is enjoyable up to a point so I would consider that in assigning a score. But the score is referring to something fundamentally subjective—my mental state when tasting the wine relative to past experience. Does such a score reflect only my personal preferences? Not necessarily. When I assess a wine I consider what drinkers who prefer this style would think about it. I assess whether it has the characteristics we expect from a wine of this type? Aesthetic response is not reducible to mere preference.

Thus I disagree with David’s view that a rank order is not sufficiently informative to make wine scoring worthwhile. A wine that receives 90 points is marginally more enjoyable than one that scores 89. It is significantly better than a wine scored at 85. “Marginally” and “significantly” are not mathematically precise terms but their meaning is well understood. The fact that numerical rankings are intuitively clear is a point in their favor. It seems to me they are easily understood which makes them a good marketing tool.

If this is the meaning of a wine score, why would anyone be interested? If a knowledgeable, experienced, honest critic enjoys a wine enough to score it more highly than comparable wines, that is worth knowing. There is of course no guarantee that the reader will enjoy it as well. People differ in their preferences. But that information is still worth knowing because it means the wine is appealing to at least one sophisticated taster. That in itself is a good reason to try the wine.

I don’t know the degree to which the well-known wine critics at major publications would agree with this view. But I don’t know what else a wine score could mean.

On the Semantics of Minerality

09 Thursday Jan 2020

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mineralityIf you have been wondering about the state of research into minerality in wine, Alex Maltman in Decanter has you covered. He summarizes all the latest theories about minerality and supporting scientific evidence for them and ends up concluding—well, we still don’t know what it is or where it comes from

But as I read through the article it became clear to me that one reason the science is inconclusive is because there is no agreement on what we mean by “minerality” and the disagreement seems to largely stem from cultural differences.

Another illustration of the communication problem is the different word associations reported by research groups at Lincoln University in New Zealand and at California’s UC Davis. While both teams noted positive correlations between minerality and words like citrus, fresh, zingy, flinty, and smoky, the Lincoln researchers differed from those at Davis in finding no correspondence with acidity or reductive notes.

One study showed that minerality represented different things to Swiss and French wine consumers, and that the Swiss group used a markedly broader vocabulary.

When Professor Maltman turns to the question of where minerality comes from, it seems the science is hampered by that lack of agreement on what the term “minerality” refers to:

A later investigation, from UC Davis, reported that professional tasters found minerality in wines with greater malic and tartaric acidity and, to a lesser extent, free and total sulphur dioxide. However, a New Zealand study, while supporting a role for sulphur dioxide, found no correlation between acidity and perceived minerality, nor with reductive notes.

Here is what stood out to me. The New Zealand study found no correlation between acidity or reductive notes as the cause of minerality. But notice in the first quote, the New Zealand team found no correlation between minerality and word associations indicating acidity and reductive notes. In other words, for New Zealanders, high acid or sulfur compounds were not viewed as the cause of minerality because they don’t refer to high acid or sulfurous wines as “minerally”.

The basic problem is that there are cultural differences in the words used to describe wines. Thus, cross-cultural analyses of causal connections between compounds in the wine and our perceptions will be influenced by how we talk about those perceptions.

This is not unusual. Obviously in our language use we are deeply influenced by the people we interact with and there are often significant cultural differences between language groups even if they nominally speak the same language. There is little reason to think New Zealanders and Americans or the French and the Swiss would share all linguistic references despite the overlap in their official languages.

People have different names for things. That doesn’t necessarily mean we disagree about the underlying non-linguistic phenomenon.

What there does seem to be agreement on is that “minerality” doesn’t come directly from soil or rocks. Despite the tendency to talk as if there are such connections the science seems conclusive.

It’s Time to Change How we Describe Wine

19 Thursday Dec 2019

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aroma wheelAt Wine Enthusiast, Caroline Hatchett asks “Is it Time to Change How We Describe Wine?”

My answer to that question is of, course, yes, and for many reasons, the primary one being that our descriptive vocabulary doesn’t really capture the individuality of particular wines. Any number of wines might fit the description of a typical tasting note drawn from the tasting grids used by WSET or the Court of Master Sommeliers.

And that reason is related to several quotes from Hatchett’s article. Comparing the technical vocabulary of winespeak with writing about rock music, Hardy Wallace, winemaker at Napa’s  Dirty and Rowdy points out:

“Nobody writes about guitar types and pickups,” he says. “They talk about how an album makes them feel. That it’s triumphant.”

Brett Heiar, Wine Director at Chicago’s Nico Osteria, an Italian restaurant, adds:

“When was the last time you bought a wine because someone said it tasted like cassis, black cherries and smoke?”…. “Medium-plus acid means nothing to the general public.”

Those aroma notes might help a blind taster identify the varietal. If you know the varietal ,those aroma notes might lead you to conclude the wine is typical or atypical. But they tell us nothing about whether the wine is enjoyable and why it is enjoyable.

As to what sort of vocabulary should replace the “basket of fruit” approach, as you might imagine, there was no consensus and a lot wild suggestions:

Grieco and his team employ aggressive hospitality when an unsuspecting guest opens the wine list and gets overwhelmed, intimidated and upset.

“I want you to close the list as quickly as possible so we can have a conversation,” says Grieco. “It’s done for the sole purpose of intimidating you, so you look at me and say, ‘Paul, just bring me a glass of wine.’ I want to have fun, and for you to have fun with me. I want to take you on a journey.”

Intimidation may not be the best approach to starting a conversation. But the common theme among all the contributors was that wine talk must tell a story and speak to wine’s ability to engage the emotions.

What these establishments offer is an education in wine through storytelling. It engages visitors when they step into a world they may not fully understand. The approach is meant to let people connect with wine emotionally and intellectually. In the process, they can find something new that fits a moment in time.

Not every delicious wine has an interesting story behind it. But every delicious wine will take you on a journey; it will have some kind of impact, and it’s time we learn to describe that impact.

Book Review: Drink More Wine! A Simple Guide to Peak Experiences NOW

18 Wednesday Dec 2019

Posted by in 3 Quarks Daily Column, Book Reviews, Contemporary Food Culture, Wine Culture

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claridgeCross-posted at Three Quarks Daily.

It’s the holiday season and time to think about presents for the budding wine lover in your life. Of course, any season is the right time to think about that. You should always support your local wine lover. One place to begin is this compelling book by long-time food critic Jon Palmer Claridge entitled Drink More Wine! A Simple Guide to Peak Experiences Now. Most books on wine are meant to inform. This book is no exception, but it is also meant to inspire. It performs both tasks admirably and raises a philosophical issue to ponder as well.

Claridge delivers essential information about varietals and wine regions in easily digestible, bit-sized morsels along with helpful advice on topics such as how to read a wine label, wine and food pairings, setting up wine tastings, storing and serving wines. He covers just enough grape varietals and regions to pique the interest of people new to wine without weighing things down with too much information. (There are, thankfully, no dissertations on soil types or yeast strains.) He manages an authoritative voice without sounding like a snob and most of this information is disseminated via charming, personal vignettes from his extensive travel and entertainment experiences. Most helpful are his recommendations for wines that are affordable and available at even modestly well-stocked wine stores thus avoiding the common complaint that wine writers focus on wines that ordinary consumers can’t find. His advice about buying budget wine in the supermarket is particularly helpful. (Tip: Beware the bait and switch. Stores will use high scores from one superior vintage to sell that wine from a different vintage).

Wine enthusiasts with a passing knowledge of wine regions and varietals will not be surprised by most of this information. But for people just getting into wine or thinking about getting into wine, this book provides, not only the information they need to begin to sort out the complex world of wine, but also the inspiration to continue to improve their wine knowledge. His advice about how to taste wine and improve one’s palate scrupulously avoids jargon and gently guides the reader toward thoughtfully paying attention to what you taste—because the message Claridge consistently articulates is that you will enjoy wine more the more knowledge you gain.

“As these steps become habit, each new glass becomes a playground. Or even better, a puzzle with multiple solutions. The harder you play, the greater the rewards”.

This persistent message that knowledge and thoughtful attention is essential to getting the most out of wine distinguishes his approach from many other wine books on the market. Despite the promise to “demystify” wine and make it accessible to newcomers, he never suggests that wine is easy, purely subjective so “drink what you like”, or lacking in important quality distinctions. In fact, he is clear that the pursuit of peak experiences in the realm of food and wine is an extremely rewarding but, nevertheless, life-long pursuit.

Which brings me to the inspirational part of the book. The insistence of the subtitle is no offhandedly proffered click bait. The promise of the book is not merely the enjoyment of wine as an everyday experience but the enjoyment of wine and food as a peak experience. The book is liberally peppered with enthusiastic stories about memorable meetings with legendary winemakers and visits to Michelin three-starred temples of gastronomy, the latter of which are described in excruciating detail, as if the reader could enjoy a peak experience of food by reading about it. This almost works. Claridge faces the dilemma all food writers face. We lack a vocabulary for describing taste and flavor. Thus, his accounts of gastronomic bliss consist of detailed lists of ingredients appended by superlatives. One dish is “swoon-worthy”, another is “divinely sigh-inducing”, another a revelation. Certain wine pairings are “mind-blowing”.  The choreography, coordination and attention to detail of the extraordinary service at Michelin-worthy restaurants always gets a mention. In short, Claridge enjoys being pampered and beguiled and thinks you should too. As much as this sounds a bit excessive, it does inspire. His enthusiasm is so rich and all-encompassing that if you aren’t motivated to start googling “Michelin restaurants near me” by the time you finish the book, you may lack the gene for peak experience.

Along the way we get a peak experience travel itinerary supported by light-handed advice about places to stay and things to do. An endearing account of a trip down the Danube is especially alluring. Although his passion for creative, meticulously prepared tasting menus is in the foreground, he devotes some attention to seeking out local food traditions if they are one-of-a-kind experiences—such as the lost art of the spice cake gâteau à la broche kept alive in the small hamlet of Sia in the Hautes-Pyrénées  of Southwestern France. He also gives a shout out to several adventurous chefs who lack Michelin stars but showcase Michelin chops. As he rightly points out, you can find peak experiences in almost every locale if you know where to look. Which brings me to another reason to like this book. He devotes considerable attention to up and coming wine regions as travel destinations including Long Island’s North Fork, Texas Hill Country, Virginia, and the Finger Lakes in the United States, as well as South Africa, UK, Greece, Mexico, and Canada. Many of the world’s storied wine regions have become pricey and crowded. Some of the best wine and food adventures can be had in these lesser known regions where they are very serious about their wines and all-in on attracting the global tourist trade.

If jetting to far-flung food and wine destinations is not on your agenda, peak experiences can be found at home as well. His discussions of home entertaining include much well-informed attention to wine and food pairing, again using wines that are readily available.  He provides suggestions for each varietal, as well as pairings to avoid. This includes some surprising pairings. I’m looking forward to trying a Gewurztraminer with raw tomatoes, a pairing which has never occurred to me. If you’re a creative home cook and enjoy pairing your dishes with wine, his discussion of how to add bridge flavors to your food to improve the match is especially useful. (Tip: Add dried cherries, mushrooms or white truffle oil to a dish to make it sing with Pinot Noir.) He thankfully dispenses with the outdated advice to serve only white wine with fish and red wine with meat.

He even gives advice on how to throw a food-theatrical dinner party for those so inclined. (Tip: Use as many plates, glasses, and as much silverware as possible.) If you’re really ambitious he includes a complete turducken recipe. (For the uninitiated, that is a deboned duck inside a deboned chicken inside a roast turkey.) The message? Peak experiences require lots of work.

Here is the philosophical issue. What is the secret sauce for achieving peak experience now? On one uncharitable reading of the book the secret is cheap wine and expensive meals. There is tension between his zeal to persuade prospective wine enthusiasts to seize the day and drink what is affordably available and his zeal to persuade everyone that the road to joyful ecstasy runs through the world’s temples of gastronomy such as Noma or Arzak. This equation doesn’t quite compute. The problem is that a peak experience is by definition out of the ordinary—only pleasures rare, exciting and deeply moving count. The idea that you can have one by slugging (or even reverently sipping) a bottle of supermarket plonk is silly. So I think that is not what he is arguing. Instead, the takeaway message is that any journey toward peak experience must start somewhere. That “somewhere” can be anywhere you are—including the aisle at your local grocery store. But that is only the beginning. The rare, exciting, and deeply moving will not come cheaply or without effort but it is worth it. The trick is to begin NOW and allow an openness to experience to carry you along enabling the best the world has to offer to draw you in.

Alas, his epilogue “My Bout With Gout” shows the limits of that ardor.

If you read this book and follow his advice, you won’t become a wine expert overnight, but you will become a wine and food lover and who wouldn’t choose love over expertise?

Tasting Vitality (2): Structure

12 Thursday Dec 2019

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wine structureIn a previous post I described the motivation behind a revised wine tasting model that elevates a wine’s rhythm and motion on the palate, giving them equal billing with aromas.

In this current post I give a rough summary of what I mean by “rhythm”.

A tasting regime that focuses on movement and rhythm must begin with structure. Structure refers to the interplay of the basic foundational components of a wine. It is that interplay that sets the wine in motion and gives us the perception of movement. “Structure” refers to four primary components of a wine: fruit power including residual sugar when present, acidity, tannins, and alcohol.

These structural components create the body of the wine. However, the interplay between these components does not occur all at once. We sense this interplay as unfolding in time. The relationships between acidity, tannins, fruit power, and alcohol shift as the wine unfolds. How they do so contributes to the personality that each wine has. Most tasting notes include reference to a cumulative, quantitative assessment of structural elements—a wine might be described as “full bodied”, with high acidity and firm tannins. Textural descriptors such as “soft”, “textured”, or “angular” are also typical. But these descriptions do not tell us much about how the wine will be experienced unless we view them as part of an unfolding process. The quality and personality of a wine depend on how these components come together in relationships of mutual support or antagonism. It is this interplay and the intensities we experience from it that I refer to as rhythm.

It’s important to point out that, although we taste a wine as a whole, each structural component is contributing a distinct quality to the wine and they form a series of contrasts or polarities. Fruit power gives the wine weight and roundness. Alcohol can contribute to the softness of the texture. Acidity contributes sharpness, angularity, and can make the wine feel hard while also causing the mouth to water. Tannins contribute roughness and astringency. These are sharply contrasting tactile sensations that must become integrated and work together if the wine is to be pleasing. However, that integration does not happen all at once. Most reasonably complex wines have moments of tension where the components seem to resist each other and moments of relaxation in which harmony ensues. The key point is that as we track this dynamic movement on the palate the wine is setting up polarities. The relative prominence of the fruit, acidity or tannins, exhibit high points and low points with the acid straining to be noticed against the swelling graininess of the tannins, or the fruit power trying to hold on to its prominence as the other components emerge.

Wines differ in how much tension is exhibited through this dynamic movement. In some wines the contrast between the sweetness of the fruit or the softness of the alcohol seems in tension with searing acidity or the grain of the tannins. In other wines, the struggle for attention between structural components is reserved and full of finesse. But in any case, in a wine of high quality the various elements are constraining each other, working together at key moments to reign each other in, each providing an anchor that the others play off of. As we taste a wine, the wine is at work resolving these tensions. How it accomplishes that resolution is an important dimension of wine quality.

Tasting vitality is about mapping these polarities and then experiencing their resolution.

In a future post I will introduce some categories to help grasp this motion on the palate.

Tasting Vitality: An Introduction

04 Wednesday Dec 2019

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drinking wine 2For the past two years, I’ve been working intermittently on developing a new wine tasting model to be included in the book I’m writing on the philosophy of wine. I’ve finally gotten around to working it up into something publishable at least on a blog. So I will be devoting some posts to it over the next several weeks.

Current tasting models used in tasting notes and in certification programs are focused largely on aromas and flavors, and we have a well-developed vocabulary for describing them. It is obvious why tasting models focus on aromas. Aromas are the signature of a wine—they provide important clues about the varietal, where the grapes were grown, and how the wine was made. Because the paradigm of wine assessment is blind tasting with a goal of inferring origins from a wine’s properties, the identification of aromas is important for that task.

As important as aromas and flavor notes are however they are not the whole wine. Blind tasting aside, our enjoyment of a wine depends crucially on mouthfeel but also on a dimension of wine that is seldom emphasized in our tasting models—the movement of the wine on the palate. In fact, I want to suggest that a wine’s perceived movement on the palate is not only one determinant of wine quality but is central to a wine’s personality. Distinctive wines have a distinctive manner in which their tactile qualities unfold. Yet, our way of describing these features is not nearly as well developed as our description of flavor notes.

Thus, my primary goal in developing a tasting model is to provide an analysis of this dimension of wine tasting. Essentially, I’m arguing that individual wines have a rhythm and I’m trying to describe the various rhythms that wines exhibit. I won’t be ignoring aromas or flavors but rhythm and mouthfeel will get equal billing.

So stay tuned.

Does Wine Have a Rhythm?

07 Thursday Nov 2019

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musical notesThat sounds like a curious question at first. Rhythm refers to the placement of sounds through time. But an ordered pattern of blinking lights might also have a rhythm. Sound is not essential to the concept; anything that displays an ordered sequence through time could have a rhythm. So what is the ordered pattern through time that a wine displays? A wine’s features aren’t displayed all at once. As the wine moves across the palate we sense some of its features sequentially. Usually the fruit appears first, flavor and aroma notes emerge and disappear, at some point we begin to sense the acidity, and then the tannins, and as the wine evolves in the mouth these components expand and contract, jostling for our attention, their relative degrees of prominence fluctuating with differing degrees of duration and acceleration.

So I think wines do have rhythm. The question is does that matter. Is their some relation between rhythm and quality? Music of course has rhythm but there isn’t some type of rhythm that is preferred by listeners. What matters is not the type of rhythm but the cohesion of the rhythmic elements and especially of the musicians playing the rhythm. Yet, in any reasonable complex piece of music, the musicians are not playing the same rhythm. Cohesion is not based on sameness but on variations that seem to communicate with each other. (Listen to Ron Carter and Tony Williams on Miles Davis’ Seven Steps to Heaven for an example.)

That gives us a clue about how a wine’s rhythm matters. As the various components of a wine are displayed through time they do not appear in unison but diverge sharply and may appear to be in tension with the acidity straining to be noticed, the tannins relentlessly becoming more prominent, the fruit power trying to hold onto its dominance. Some wines display a great deal of tension; in other wines the struggle for attention is more reserved and full of finesse. But in any case, in a wine of high quality the various elements are constraining each other, working together at key moments to reign each other in, each providing an anchor that the others play off of. Even a display of searing acidity or chewy tannins seems to hit the mark. Wine critics used to call this the “knit” of a wine which is helpful but doesn’t describe the dynamic element. In the end, great wines have a sense of effortless resolution. All that tension finally settles on a direction with all the contrasting elements finding a balance point that seems complete. No component failed to deliver, but nothing was left exposed and the dominant elements feel properly limited by contrasting elements. The final movement settled into its pocket.

If I had to choose one property of a wine that is the most reliable indicator of quality it would be this sense of effortless, rhythmic resolution. There is no single word to describe it. “Elegance” or “gracefulness” is appropriate for some wines but there are some wild and wooly beasts—a great Amarone for instance–that nevertheless achieve this resolution.

Wine Lovers Carry On

14 Monday Oct 2019

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raising a wine glassThose of us who are fascinated by wine live in a world where we looked upon by most people as at best peculiar and at worst a total wastrel. If get your thrills tracking wine quality through variations in soil, weather, climate  and production style you’re a geek. If you provide detailed, public analysis of those variations you’re pretentious. Spending hard earned dollars on  a distinctive bottling borders on immorality. And heaven forbid if you write about wine and try to capture its complexity you’re guilty logorrhea (i.e. excessive verbosity, too much jabber jabber).

So I found Lauren Mowery’s recent article in Wine Enthusiast  to be immensely inspirational. Entitled “Pliny the Elder, the First Wine Critic and Why He Still Matters” Mowery traces some of our current practices in wine appreciation back to the ancient Romans especially the great military officer and author, Pliny, who had an interest in all things fermented.

Pliny’s extensive writings on “first growths” encompassed Falernian, the legendary wine of ancient Rome. This grape from Campania came from the slopes of Mount Massico, today the Falerno del Massico DOC.

He recorded the best sites of modern-day Lombardy, Venice, Emilia-Romagna, Marche and Tuscany. He detailed the finest vineyards south of Naples, along the Adriatic coast, where he acknowledged the high-quality estate of Mamertine from Messina, Sicily.

Pliny wrote of the healing properties of Prosecco. He recounted the rich, tannic wines of Pompeii, which was recreated recently using two ancient strains (Piedirosso and Olivella) in an experiment to taste wines of his times.

In other words, many of the preoccupations of wine lovers today have not only deep historical origins but continuity over two millennia.

The fact that a practice has such a tradition behind it does not in itself make it valuable. Some traditions are better left behind. But the fact that very different people in vastly different societies under utterly different historical conditions were serious and knowledgeable about wine appreciation shows that the allure of fine taste captures something deep in the human imagination.

Ridiculing wine tasting is a bit like ridiculing Shakespeare or great athleticism. You can do so but what you’re revealing about yourself isn’t pretty.

Wine Metaphors and Interpretation

03 Thursday Oct 2019

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wine pouredLast week I linked to several examples of what has become a favorite theme in wine media—complaints about wine language, especially the use of metaphors that make use of the features of a person to describe a wine. (See here,  here  and here for examples of the complaints)

The complaint is almost always that metaphorical attributions are too subjective and ambiguous and serve no purpose other than advertising the writer’s facility with words.

There are several things to say about these objections. One is that the problem is not unique to wine. Unless metaphors have become dead metaphors there will always be ambiguities about how to interpret them in any field. Poetic metaphors are obviously complex and difficult to parse, but even conversational metaphors such as “Bill is a bulldozer” or “Jane is a block of ice” may raise questions about which features of Bill or Jane the metaphor is highlighting. You would have to know something about Bill or Jane before being confident about what the metaphor means. All living metaphors require interpretation.

In interpreting metaphors, context is essential. To grasp what a “sinewy” wine might be, one must know something about the range of textural and tactile differences in wine and have tasted enough to sense the differences between them. To know what Robert Parker meant when he referred to the 2001 Batard-Montrachet as a “streetwalker”, you have to know that some wines are flamboyant and expressive, but unrefined, superficial and lacking substance. The complaint about ambiguity is often made from the perspective of a wine novice. But, of course, wine metaphors will be opaque to a novice. Understanding a metaphor will often require refined capacities to taste. It would be a peculiar writing practice if its most excellent examples were aimed only at novices. We don’t have such an expectation regarding the language used in art appreciation, baseball, or bird watching. Some of the vocabulary of any domain of expertise will be opaque to novices.

As to more experienced tasters, many metaphors have become so common they require only a bit of thought to figure out what they mean. Wines are routinely described as “generous”, “brooding” or “shy”. Surely, these pose no special interpretive difficulties for someone with some tasting experience and there is no reason to think these are more subjective than, for instance, aroma notes. Thus, it’s only new metaphors that have no established history of conventional use that might be troublesome. Which brings me to the most important reason why metaphor is essential. There is no off-the-shelf vocabulary for describing holistic properties that also get at a wine’s individuality without employing metaphor. Individual fruit and flower descriptors will only get you so far.

I will explain what I mean by this next week when I continue this series of posts on wine metaphors.