Why Wine Writers Talk Funny

[Busboy]

Interesting article in Slate on the emergence of contemporary wine descriptors.

In his book The Taste of Wine, legendary French oenologist Emile Peynaud elegantly explained the conundrum. "We tasters feel to some extent betrayed by language," he wrote. "It is impossible to describe a wine without simplifying and distorting its image." This linguistic failure is surely one reason that numerical scores for wines have proven so popular; points are simplistic and distorting, too, but they at least give you something to hold onto—more so than, say, "spice box," "melted asphalt," or "liquefied minerals."

So, how did such phrases become standard-issue wine nomenclature?

[MaxH]

This topic is so perennial in wine writing. 35 years ago in a popular introductory US wine book, Alexis Bespaloff complained about people waxing poetic instead of descriptive. He quoted a critic's description of a good Burgundy that cited many glorious things in life that the wine brought to mind. Yet the critic didn't bother with basics -- was the wine red or white?

But as the posted comments said, people always struggle to express smells and tastes in words, and even when they are down to earth about it, this sounds strange to readers unused to taste language.

... This linguistic failure is surely one reason that numerical scores for wines have proven so popular; points are simplistic and distorting, too, but they at least give you something to hold onto

Amazing what explanations continue to arise for point scores, especially among people who don't remember their arrival. Before 100-point scales, wine criticism in US newsletters looked much like today's, but instead of points it used gradings like excellent / good / fair / poor, or zero, one, two, three stars.

These equally gave you something to hold on to, and without pretense of extreme precision or objectivity. (I could show many examples, and one of the drawbacks of knowing them is that I can't, alas, indulge in the notion-of-the-month about why 100-point ratings proved popular.)