Tag Archives: wine tasting

Wine Tasting in the Age of Corona

16 Monday Mar 2020

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croweded tastiing roomAs the U.S. begins to implement social distancing in order to reduce transmission of the coronavirus to manageable levels, there are two things we should not be doing right now:

(1) Mingling in crowded public spaces; and

(2) Listening to Republicans who are trying to make you sick.

This is a real crisis and the basic mathematics of exponential  growth tells us so.

Given that tasting rooms at some wineries on Saturday afternoon are basically just a crowded, elbow-to-elbow  barroom, now is probably not a good time to go wine tasting. Just stay home.

However, at some point in that dimly seen horizon called “the future”, people will emerge from behind their battlements seeking social contact. Even then, barring a medical breakthrough, this virus will still be with us. I suspect some degree of social distancing will be necessary for quite some time.

What does that mean for visits to wineries?  Many wineries will develop innovative ways of adapting in order to sell their wines. Here are several good suggestions from Rob McMillan for how wineries can start thinking about adapting to the situation.

But what about the consumer visiting the winery? How should we adapt? Here are a few suggestions:

1. Take advantage of private tastings. They are more expensive but your health is priceless.

But If you’re going to a public tasting room:

2. Choose one that isn’t crowded. If you arrive at your chosen destination and it’s too crowded go to the next one. Plan ahead with several destinations in mind.

3. Bring your own glassware, pen and notepad.

4. Sit outside. Most wineries have outdoor seating and they will probably make it even more accommodating as a way of encouraging people to visit.

5. Do not touch the menu or flight map. Again, wineries may find ways of supplying informational material that does not require handling.

6. Wipe down your seating area with hand-sanitizing wipes. Wineries should make these available.

If we become accustomed to following good social distancing practices visiting a winery should not be especially dangerous once the period of peak transmission passes.

More Evidence that Tasting Expertise is Real

12 Thursday Mar 2020

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wine judgingThe best evidence that tasting expertise is real and that some dimensions of wine tasting are objective is the fact that, each year, many people past the rigorous Master of Wine and Master Sommelier exams. If wine tasting is not a genuine skill what explains their ability to pass the exam?

But it also helps to have real world experiments like this one conducted by Christian Wolf, the organizer of the European wine competition Mundus Vini.

Twice a year, MUNDUS VINI brings more than 280 international judges together to taste in groups of six or seven. For the summer edition in 2019, Wolf created eight special groups: there was a table of women; a table of men; a table of Germans; a table with older jurors; a group of younger jurors; people drawn from the wine trade; a table of sommeliers; and a table of wine writers.

Each group was presented with a flight of wines that was also given to another table, while individual wines were doubled and given to different juries.

Regardless of age, gender or nationality, the wines received the same scores.

Wolf was testing the hypothesis that there are cultural, gender, or age differences in how professionals judge wine. Apparently that hypothesis is not warranted.

Wolf attributes the consistency of these results to the method of scoring he uses for his competitions. Called the OIV judging system, it requires judges to focus on one wine at a time, rather than as part of a line up. The score is determined by summing subscores on a variety of specific attributes.

Truth be told, not all competitions show this level of consistency. Wolf might well be right that the discipline of assigning scores for various dimensions of a wine is the key to consistency among tasters.

Wolf intends to replicate this test with a much larger sample size.

Tasting Vitality IV: Basic Elements of Wine Structure

04 Wednesday Mar 2020

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Iwine-in-glass’ve been focused recently on creating a tasting model that puts greater emphasis on a wine’s perceived motion on the palate as an important element in wine quality. (See this post for an explanation and links to earlier posts in this series.)

The features of a wine’s movement on the palate that I have emphasized thus far are abstract although necessary to provide a foundation to what follows. They include velocity, acceleration, duration, and force—general features of all movement and processes.

It is now time to focus on the perceived qualities of the wine produced by these general features of processes. I’m going to begin by discussing mouthfeel because the way the wine feels in the mouth—primarily tactile sensations—gives us access to the wine’s structural elements—Sweetness, fruit power, tannins, acidity, and alcohol. Such access is not wholly a matter of tactile sensations. Acidity sometimes tastes sour, alcohol can leave an impression of sweetness, tannins can taste bitter. Nevertheless, it’s through mouthfeel that we get the most information about a wine’s structure.

If we are to understand the perceived changes a wine undergoes on the palate, we first need an account of what is changing. Thus, I begin with a static description of wine structure and balance. These dimensions will be expressed as continua because all of these features admit of degrees. Each wine will occupy a position on each continuum.

The tasting model then follows a logical progression. After the basic structural components of wine and their range of expression are described and the concept of balance clarified, we move onto the basic mouthfeel characteristics resulting from the interplay of these structural components. The focus here will be on various dimensions of what we call a wine’s “body”. For experienced wine tasters this will be familiar and unsurprising.

Finally, we put the structure of wine in motion describing how the mouthfeel of a wine unfolds in time and detailing the various kinds of expressions of which wine is capable when we look at its movement on the palate. This latter section will be conceptually innovative.

This discussion of wine in motion will include reference to vitality forms, a topic I covered in two Three Quarks Daily columns last year. (Vitality forms and music; and vitality forms and wine) Each continuum that describes the range of a wine’s motion will be associated with vitality forms that express a position on that continuum. Vitality forms, as understood in psychology, are the psychological experience of how something moves, from which we gain a sense of something being alive. They are the “flow pattern” of experience. Vitality forms are implicated in emotions, and patterns of vitality forms are in part constitutive of the expression of personality traits.

Because wine is experienced as moving across the palate, wine also exhibits vitality forms and each distinctive wine will have a distinctive flow pattern. Thus, the flow pattern of wine across the palate exhibits similarities to other things that move. The problem is how to describe this flow pattern in a way that captures the individuality of a wine. The richest vocabulary we have for expressing the individuality of distinctive flow patterns is the realm of emotion, mood, and personality. Thus, I argue that the best way of capturing the individuality of wines is by utilizing metaphors based on the domain of mood, emotion, and personality. I will conclude this section of the motion of wine by explaining how wines can be viewed as expressing emotion and possessing personality.

Much of that will be laid out in future posts. In this post which is already too long, I stick to the basic elements of structure.

Basic Components of Structure

The texture and mouthfeel of a wine depend on its structure which consists of five basic components—sweetness, fruit power, acidity, tannins, and alcohol. Analytic wine tasting separates out these components and assesses their contribution to the overall structure of the wine. These are expressed as continua.

Fruit power:

Intense ….meagre

Persistent ….fading

Fruit power includes the perception of aromatic/flavor intensity as well as the persistence, force and dominance of fruit in the structure of the wine accessed via its mouthfeel.

Acidity:

Dull…..bright…..green

The influence of acidity can be assessed only after considering the wine’s movement on the palate. But as an initial assessment, the amount and quality of acidity can be judged via this continuum. “Green” refers to acidity from fruit picked prior to developing sufficient ripeness and will taste hard and harsh. Wines with low acidity will not only appear dull but will also lack vibrancy and will taste dull.

Perceived Sweetness:

Bone dry….dry….off dry….medium sweet….sweet

This dimension is about how the wine is perceived, not how much measurable sugar there is in the wine. Perceived sweetness is often influenced by acidity. High acid wines will taste less sweet than a low acid wine with the same amount of residual sugar. Sweetness can also be confused with fruit power. Dry wines with great fruit power often leave an impression of sweetness.

Tannins/astringency

Quantity: light….tannic

Grain size: Powdery….fine grain… medium grain…coarse

Quality: Soft….drying….chewy…..grippy

Alcohol:

Imperceptible …..hot

Alcohol does not have a linear relationship with qualitative properties. In dry wines, higher alcohol can contribute to perceptions of increased sweetness, weight, roundness, softness and viscosity. But low alcohol wines with residual sugar might also taste heavy and viscous. The perception of alcohol will depend on its relative prominence compared to other components of the wine’s structure. Alcohol has a multitude of functions that can’t be captured on a continuum. However because alcohol produces a tactile sensation akin to burning, high alcohol or unbalanced wines tend to taste “hot”. Since this will mask other flavors and aromas and detract from the enjoyment of a wine, this is considered a fault. Thus, in tasting notes alcohol gets a mention only when the wine is unbalanced. Much of the influence of alcohol will be covered as a component of other features of the wine such as body.

Balance:

Unbalanced….balanced….integrated/harmonious

“Balance” refers to the relative prominence of the various structural elements.

Balance is an essential but controversial concept. Most wine experts agree that balance is crucial to wine quality and what counts as balance depends on the varietal and style of a wine. For instance, a balanced Cabernet Sauvignon will have firmer tannins than a balanced Pinot Noir. The penetrating, astringent attack of acidity in a Chablis would be out of place in a Gewurztraminer. But there are several definitions of balance. Karen McNeil, author of The Wine Bible, defines a balanced wine as “A wine that incorporates all of its main components – tannins, acid and alcohol – in a manner where no single component stands out.” This is perhaps the most common definition although most would include fruit power/sugar in the list of components that must be in balance. “Balance” in this sense is a minimal standard. Many quite ordinary wines will seem balanced in that no structural component will stand out as excessive or lacking.

The great wine scientist and educator Emile Peynaud, in his classic, The Taste of Wine adds a crucial dimension to balance. “A wine is said to be harmonious when its elements form a pleasing and well proportioned whole. In a good wine, everything should be harmonious; quality is always linked to a subtle play of balances between tastes and smells.” Peynaud’s suggestion is that it is not sufficient that the structural components achieve equilibrium. Rather they must enhance each other. Acidity makes the fruit taste vibrant. Tannins and alcohol give the wine depth and prevent the acidity from tasting sour, and fruit power acts as the focal point seeming to reign in the other components. I will return to this concept of balance and harmony below when a wine’s rhythm will come into play.

In the next post in this series I will look at how the interplay of these structural components produces a wine’s mouthfeel.

A Motto That Makes Me Run Away

02 Monday Mar 2020

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run awayI recently came across a winery whose motto is “if you like it, it’s good”. That motto is a really good reason not to visit this winery. The wine is unlikely to be worth exploring.

“If you like it, it is good” assumes there is nothing beyond your merely liking something that accounts for its quality, nothing more to be discovered and nothing more to be enjoyed beyond what you already like. It assumes that  you have no reason to recognize the limitations of what you like or search for something better. It is a shame to encourage such an attitude in wine drinkers.

People in wine education, of course, know this is misleading—that is why they put in the work to gain expertise. But they pretend otherwise because customers want their palates validated and are perceived to be intimidated if wine becomes too serious. Granted, not every situation is a “teaching” situation and sommeliers/merchants must be sensitive to what the customer is looking for. But to dismiss the possibility of educating a palate is irresponsible.

Of course, we can appreciate a wine for all sorts of reasons that are only modestly related to its quality—when relaxing after work for instance. Enjoying what is in front of you regardless of merit may be all that matters in some contexts. But it is to be hoped that a winery is striving for some sort of excellence; that some of their wines meet a less subjective standard in which discovery, learning, and insight can be gained from drinking their wines.

Thinking about Objectivity and Wine Tasting

20 Thursday Feb 2020

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wine tastingAlthough the belief that wine tasting is subjective is common even among wine professionals, no one in the wine industry really believes it.

Everyone from consumers to wine shop owners, to wine critics, to winemakers are in the business of distinguishing good wine from bad wine and communicating those distinctions to others. Ask any winemaker why she controls her fermentation temperatures and you will hear some version of the claim that doing so makes better wine. If wine quality were purely subjective there would be no reason to listen to anyone about wine quality. Wine education would be an oxymoron; quality control an exercise in futility; wine criticism just empty piffle.

The most telling fact about the existence of objective judgments and genuine expertise is the fact that many wine experts successfully pass the rigorous Master of Wine or Master Sommelier exams. To pass the tasting portion of the Master of Wine exam you have to sit for three 12-wine blind tastings, each lasting two and a quarter hours, in which wines from anyplace in the world must be assessed for variety, origin, winemaking, quality and style. They aren’t consulting oracles or hallucinating their answers. If you don’t know your stuff, you don’t pass, period. If wine tasting is wholly subjective what explains their ability to pass the exam?

However the fact that wine expertise is real does not quite secure the argument that judgments about wine quality are objective. This is because, too often, reasoning about wine quality is circular. (This by the way is a well known problem in philosophical aesthetics.)

Here is the problem:

How do we know what wine quality is? The best answer is that competent, qualified judges determine what wine quality is—the folks that pass the MW exam for instance.  But how do we know they are the competent judges? They’re the ones who can identify wine quality.

That is a logical circle. A is true because B is true. But B is true because A is true.

The problem is we need an independent account of what wine quality is. One way of solving this problem is to point to a consensus. If all competent judges come to agreement about wine quality, that is evidence that their judgments are objective.

As we know from debates about wine quality, competent judges come to vastly different conclusions about the value of the wines they assess. Although there is broad consensus in the wine world that a Chateau Lafite from a good vintage is of higher quality than your bottom shelf $8 Chianti, more fine-grained judgments elude the consensus necessary to avoid the circle.

Something to ponder for the weekend.

Funk is the New Black

06 Thursday Feb 2020

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Markham Heid explores the hermeneutics of “funky” in the wine world.

Traditionally, funky meant that something was off,” says Linda Bisson, a professor emeritus of enology and viticulture at the University of California, Davis. “If something was funky, that’s when you brought in the quality control people to see what was wrong.” But times have changed. While some still use “funky” to describe a wine that has obvious or unpleasant flaws, many now employ it as a synonym for “unconventional,” or as a sort of catch-all adjective for those hard-to-pin-down qualities that make natural wines unique and appealing….In other words, “funky” is a wine that surprises you.

I’m old enough to remember when “funky” referred to James Brown and his Famous Flames. But long before that the word referred to a pungent odor.

So here we are today; consumers are coming to wine shops with funk on their minds.

I for one am very happy with this development. We’ve had enough of nice, pleasant wines—round, soft, polished and conventional—pretty things with nothing of difficulty about them. Real beauty is less comforting, more disruptive. A pretty face becomes beautiful when animated by something tumultuous and tense just below the surface. Same with wine.

Great wines are deviant, they don’t conform, they have an otherworldly quality, depraved but interesting, like that guy you decided not to marry.

The fact that fermented grape juice can smell like bacon, sweaty saddles or decomposed leaves is a source of endless fascination. Lemon zest is lovely but doesn’t scream originality.

 

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.