Here in the Wine Corner, we spend much of our time trying put words to what we taste. It’s not unpleasant work, but it is often challenging. All wine can be (and generally is) analyzed in someone’s lab to determine its exact compositional profile. But even if we were privy to the numbers, it’s not the same as taking a sip, sloshing it around a bit, swallowing, and then trying to reconstruct in words what just happened so we can explain it first to ourselves and then to you.
I’ve long since given up on the idea that the best way to talk about wine is via some painfully tedious cataloging of each scent and taste that can be discovered in it — elements reminiscent of other things known to taste, but for purposes of evaluating wine are rather pointless.
An eccentric but strangely canny Brit I met long ago liked to refer to this as the ‘fruits and veg’ school of wine tasting. It’s not exactly useless to note that your glass of Merlot is reminiscent of ripe plums, but the observation is about as helpful as describing your new love interest as two-legged with brown hair. Plenty of plummy Merlot and soundly-limbed brunettes in the world, you see. What we long to know is what makes this one unique, or at least distinctive, is The word we like to use for this is temperament.
It may be that your brunette is chatty, genial and outgoing; or perhaps cerebral, self-contained and intense. Rational? Romantic? Reserved? Rakish? These terms do a much better job of communicating just what sort of person it is to whom you’ve made a gift of your heart. The more legitimately descriptive terms you string together, the clearer the picture.
Were you to eavesdrop on a wine tasting in the low, narrow, submarine-like confines of the FKC wine cellar, you might overhear us ransacking the language for ways to put a name to what we taste. Can it further one’s understanding to describe a wine as earnest, petulant, complacent, cheeky , flamboyant, moody, ruminative, wistful, gregarious, columnar, buttoned down or up, a gold-digger? We think so.
You might well ask why with everything else we have to do we spend so much time burglarizing the language. That’s easy. It’s because that’s where they keep the words.