We’ve all
been there before. You pick a bottle of wine from the store shelf, turn it
around and read the label. You read a five to seven sentence description of the
wine’s flavor – evoking a variety of fruits, warm sunshine, some minerals and maybe
a wood or two. Nodding knowingly for the benefit of whoever may be watching,
you then place the bottle in your basket without a clue how the wine is going to
taste when opened.
The ancient
Greeks and Romans, our original wine snobs, did not dwell on dissecting the
various flavors of a wine, simply preferring to pass judgment – whether it was
good or bad. This practice, or lack thereof, persisted for centuries until the late
nineteenth century, when better winemaking methods raised winemaking to an art form,
leading its artisans and admirers to seek more descriptive language to expound
on its innumerable qualities. (http://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/is-there-a-better-way-to-talk-about-wine)
Our modern
wine lexicon can be traced to Ann Noble, professor of viticulture and enology
at the University of California at Davis. In 1984, drawing upon the work of
other sensory scientists, she published the Wine Aroma Wheel (http://www.winearomawheel.com/), a circular chart
of six dozen descriptors to describe wine by smell. However, while we have a
common language, experience and our reading for today’s class shows that not
everyone agrees or is aware of how the language is spoken.
For the wine
dummies like myself, I happened upon this useful guide by Wine Folly (http://winefolly.com/tutorial/40-wine-descriptions/)
that explains in plain language what some of the more commonly described
flavors are supposed to taste like when drunk. Here are some examples:
ANGULAR
An
angular wine is like putting a triangle in your mouth – it hits you in specific
places with high impact and not elsewhere. It’s like getting punched in the arm
in the same place over and over again. An angular wine also has high acidity.
COMPLEX
A
complex wine simply means that when you taste it, the flavor changes from the
moment you taste it to the moment you swallow. As much as I love complex wines,
using the word “complex” to describe a wine is a cop-out unless you go on to
describe how it’s complex.
EARTHY
A
classic go-to move for a wine writer trying to describe that awkward green and
unpleasant finish on a wine. They don’t want to hate on the wine, they just
want you to know that if you don’t like the wine it means you don’t like earthy and
you’re a bad person.
OAKED
Oh
oak! The ultimate non-grape influence to the flavors in wine. In white wine it
adds butter, vanilla and sometimes coconut. In red wine it
adds flavors often referred to as baking spices, vanilla and sometimes dill.
STEELY
A
steely wine has higher acid and more sharp edges. It is the man-ballerina of
wine.
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