Slate's Bizbox
drink: Wine, beer, and other potent potables.

Cherries, Berries, Asphalt, and JamWhy wine writers talk that way.

By Mike Steinberger
Posted Friday, June 15, 2007, at 6:18 AM ET

(Continued from page 1)

One of the more famous assaults on the new language of wine came from novelist and children's writer Roald Dahl, a renowned oenophile himself. In 1988, he wrote a letter to Britain's Decanter magazine in which he lambasted as "tommyrot" the "extravagant, meaningless similes" that were suddenly being used to describe wines. "Wine … tastes primarily of wine—grape-juice, tannin, and so on," Dahl wrote. "If I am wrong about this, and the great wine-writers are right, then there is only one conclusion. The chateaux in Bordeaux have begun to lace their grape-juice with all manner of other exotic fruit juices, as well as slinging in a bale or two of straw and a few packets of ginger biscuits for extra flavouring. Someone had better look into this." He went on, "I wonder, by the way, if these distinguished persons know that their language has become a source of ridicule in many sensible wine-drinking households. We sit around reading them aloud and shrieking with laughter."

Actually, many wine writers, distinguished and otherwise, are acutely aware of the mockery their fanciful jargon attracts. Why cling to it, then? One reason is because it seems to have some basis in reality. Anyone who follows wine criticism closely knows that there is considerable overlap in professional tasting notes. If one critic claims to detect tobacco on the nose of a La Rioja Alta Rioja, chances are another critic will independently sniff out some tobacco as well. A few years ago, I attended a tasting in New York of Domaine de la Romanée-Conti wines that included several vintages of the fabled grand cru La Tâche. Among other things, I caught a whiff of rose petals on each of the La Tâches. Not long thereafter, I read an article about La Tâche by Allen Meadows, a leading Burgundy critic, in which he noted that one of the signature aromas of La Tâche is dried rose petals. This presented two possibilities: Either we were both suffering from pickled brains, or the scent of roses really was there. Such things happen with enough frequency among experienced tasters to suggest that individual wines do indeed emit very specific, readily detectable aromas and flavors.

More importantly, many of these aromas and flavors have been shown to have a chemical basis. This was the point of an excellent article published in 2005 by The World of Fine Wine, a relatively new British quarterly that has quietly established itself as the best English-language wine journal around.* The essay, titled "The Foundations of Flavour," was written by Alex Hunt, then a Master of Wine candidate. According to Hunt, some of the most commonly observed fragrances in wines—toast, butter, vanilla, citrus, apples, cherries, pears, honey, herbs—are there because of volatile organic compounds that were either in the grapes themselves or that seeped into the finished juice. For instance, the buttery note often detected in chardonnays is an aroma compound called diacetyl, which is a byproduct of malolactic fermentation (a secondary fermentation that softens the acidity in wines). Hunt suggested that as flavor chemists further probe the molecular structure of wines, scientific explanations will be found for many other aromas. In the meantime, he said, wine critics should be puffing out their chests: "Given that most flavour descriptors have been established in ignorance of their molecular grounds, it is astonishing what competent analysts wine tasters have turned out to be. … In verbis vini veritas? More often than not, as it happens."

Hear, hear. I think that serious wine evaluation does require discussion of specific tastes and smells. Pace Amerine and Roessler, metaphors based on class, gender, fashion, and architecture can also be helpful. In addition to aromas and flavors, wines have textures, and the only way to adequately convey how a wine feels in the mouth is metaphorically (big, little, fat, thin, velvety, burly, etc.). Of course, the line between incisive and overwrought can be a fine one. British wine expert Michael Broadbent once likened a wine's bouquet to the smell of schoolgirls' uniforms (no, he wasn't arrested). And the late Auberon (son of Evelyn) Waugh, in his wine column for Britain's Tatler, described one wine as smelling of "a dead chrysanthemum on the grave of a still-born West Indian baby" (no, he wasn't fired, but he and his editor, Tina Brown, were brought before the Press Council to answer charges of insensitivity).

A bigger problem is that the effort to sniff out all sorts of aromas seems to be an end in itself for many oenophiles. The point of a tasting note is to tell the story of a wine—with brevity, clarity, and hopefully a little brio—and to render a verdict on it. Personally, I'm a lot less interested in learning the exact species of cherry that someone detects in a red Burgundy than in finding out whether the wine is good or bad, what's good or bad about it, and when might be the optimum time to drink it. Also, because wines evolve both in the glass and in the bottle, the aromatics can change quickly; the nose is just taking a snapshot, which is another reason to not get too carried away with the descriptors. Moreover, just as science is unearthing the reasons why Syrahs and merlots smell the way they do, researchers are also discovering that differences in sensory perception from one individual to the next are more pronounced than previously realized. Which suggests that wine's language problem may be even more nettlesome than we self-pitying wine writers thought.

Next week: a three-part series on sensory perception and wine.

*Correction, July 12, 2007: This piece originally stated, incorrectly, that "The Foundations of Flavour" was published in 2004. (Return to the corrected sentence.)

VIEW AS SINGLE PAGE
Print This ArticlePRINTDiscuss this in The FrayDISCUSSEmail to a FriendE-MAIL
Share on FacebookPost to MySpace!Share with MixxDigg ThisShare with RedditShare with del.icio.usShare with FurlShare with Ma.gnolia.comShare with SphereShare with Stumble Upon
Mike Steinberger is Slate's wine columnist. He can be reached at .
Photograph of wine on Slate's home page by John Foxx/Stockbyte.
Join the Fray: our reader discussion forum
What did you think of this article?
POST A MESSAGE | READ MESSAGES
Washington Post
The Washington Post
OPINIONS
A Grand Tour
David Broder | While the stars align for Obama, McCain is looking like the odd-man-out on foreign policy.
Annette Heuser: A Honeymoon
PLUS » Achenblog: The New Capitalism Socialism