Wine-Words

As befits a dabbler in wine-writing and education, I spend a great deal of time – reading, writing (and, less often, talking) – tangled up in words.
Today, feeling reflective (or possibly postmodern), I am sitting down to write an article (read: words) about (wine) words.

“Over-ripe raspberry, tar and licorice”
Why – in front of a glass of wine (fermented grape juice) – do I talk about raspberries, grapefruit, pepper, and butterscotch?
First, and most fundamentally, describing the characteristics of a wine is easier if you can reach beyond itself. There just aren’t very many strictly-grapey words. To illustrate: try to describe the taste of grapefruit juice... “grapefruity” will only get you so far.
Second, wine is composed of some variety of an estimated one thousand flavour-bearing molecules. Most of these are not unique to wine; many are featured strongly in the world around us. For example, diacetyl is noticeable in many white wines. Diacetyl also happens to be major aromatic molecule in butter (the association is so strong that diacetyl is added, in synthetic form, to margarine)*. A note could read: “diacetyl and ethyl 4-hydroxybutyrate, under isoamyl acetate and ethyl formate”... but its more likely to be understood written this way: “butter and caramel, under pear and peach”.


“Sometimes a word can be hard to resist”
Imagine the last time you watched big raindrops begin crashing into hot asphalt on a summer afternoon. Remember the smell?
Occasionally, the scent of a white wine (almost always Germanic) will trigger that memory.
I try to keep my note simple... but
I recently stumbled across a word that means, exactly, “the smell of rain”. Petrichor comes from the Greek petros (stone), and ichor (the liquid that flowed in the veins of the gods).**
Someday, I will taste a wine for which I’ll insist on using such a fantastic word in my tasting note.

Other words may not be quite so poetic, but they can delightfully fun to say.
Hagelgeschmack is the German word for the unpleasant flavour resulting from grapes being bruised by hail.


“Words can lose their precision”
What smell is “foxy”?
I’ve found glossaries which define it variously as being like bubble-gum, epitomized by Welch’s Grape Juice, and dank like a dog badly in need of a bath. Further, I’ve heard from a tasting-bar server of it being used in a radically different tone.... “foxy” like sexy. (see below)
Without an effort to clear up this mess, we’d be better off without it. We would, however, loose a bit of vocabulary worth keeping.
North American has many native grape species and varieties. What was later gathered up as varieties of one species (vitis lubrusca) settlers called “Fox Grapes”. The most familiar variety of this species is what we know as the “Concord”. With its thick, dark purple skins, green-tinged jelly like pulp, the Concord grape tastes (not to mention feels in your mouth) very different from other grape species.
Some people (myself included) like to eat these odd grapes. Many people enjoy (Welch’s) grape juice, and grape jellies and jams... these capture the flavour of vitis lubrusca. Wines have been (and, occasionally, are) made from Concord grapes, and almost everyone dislikes the way they taste.
The real debate arises when tasting wines made from “French Hybrid” grapes. These (like Baco Noir) are, through nursery tricks, half vitis vinifera (European wine grapes) and half vitis lubrusca. How much do they taste like their lubrusca parent?


“Some words are just hopelessly vague”
There are plenty of these.
Sometimes they are used with the best of intentions.
Almost always they make us deserving of mockery.

What does it mean to say that a wine to be “sexy”?
I see this descriptor often, but most frequently in the most flattering of reviewer/guru Robert Parker’s tasting notes.
Does it mean something like attractive (makes you want to take a sip), or seductive (wants you take another sip)? Is an ideal subtype of the likewise vague descriptors “feminine” and “masculine”?


“...but then again...”
All this said, I refuse to insist on (let alone live up to) absolute precision.
To me the problem using words (and phrases) with no regard to whether or not your audience is following. (ie: that “foxy” means a particularly peculiar flavour distinct to wine made from a type of grapes once known as “fox grapes”, but now known by a different name entirely).
There are plenty of wines with aspects like clouds. Capturing them in words, is no more possible than with our fingers.
This, to me, this is one of the things that makes a great wine. (Not that I haven’t met plenty of indescribable unpleasantries as well).




* Thanks to Tom Stevenson. See “Tom Stevenson’s Aromas and Flavours”, wine-pages.com
** from 30 Second Wine Advisor article titled “Finding Words for Wine”. WineLoversPage.com