The contested words to describe wine

Should wine writing be about attempting to put flavour into words or is it, in the words of Adam Gopnik “a series of elaborate plausible compliments paid to wines”? Henry Jeffreys considers the lexicon.

‘What do you taste? Remember there are not right or wrong answers’

‘Mmmm, I think it’s a little feminine’

‘Wrong!’

In the last few years, the language used to describe wine (and other drinks like whisky) has become contested. It’s changing so fast that it can be hard to keep up. This hypersensitivity about which words you can and can’t use has been combined with a drive to make the subject as accessible as possible – leading to the entirely hypothetical exchange above. On one hand, we’re told that everyone is welcome but use a term commonly used in wine-producing countries and you may find yourself slung out of the tasting.

In the past wine was described in hierarchical terms beloved by the British and indeed French ruling classes. Michael Broadbent’s notes are full of references to wines with ‘breeding’ as if it was Crufts not Bordeaux. Read Denis Morris’ Daily Telegraph Guide to the Pleasures of Wine and you get glorious guff like this:

“Le Chambertin is unquestionably the King of the Royal Family of the wines of Burgundy. Few Kings have all the virtues and none all the qualities, but this is a regal wine with qualities as outstanding as the great wines of Vosne-Romanee, Vougeot or Aloxe-Corton, and someone a further greatness that defies description but which the French would call ‘race’ or breeding, a word apt to be misunderstood in our egalitarian society.”

Morris’s book was published in 1972 and as he acknowledges, this sort of writing was on the way out. The change came in the late 1960s when the Americans started to take a serious interest in wine. Obviously for a country that had booted out hierarchy in 1776 and since then never gone in for a dynastic ruling class in any way, this would not do. A new way of tasting wine was needed. It would be objective and not hidebound by stuffy European ways. Or as Lawrence Osborne puts it in The Accidental Connoisseur:

“Wines, in other words, were no longer to be seen in terms of snobby European-style class systems; they were to be seen as fresh, democratic, healthy and natural.”

A man with the magnificently American name of Maynard Amerine who was at UC Davis from 1935 until his death in 1998 came up with a systematic way of describing wine called the flavour wheel. This was based around descriptors based around food stuffs, herbs, flowers etc. Since then it’s become the way that wine tasting is taught by organisations like the WSET (Wines and Spirits Education Trust). This way of describing wine reached its apotheosis with the kind of blank verse-like poetry of a Robert Parker wine description, the vocabulary dripping “smoked herbs, melted licorice and cassis jam.”

While this method might adequately express how a wine tastes, you’re still not really getting at what makes it pleasurable and whether it’s any good or not. This is a particular problem when assessing similar wines. Faced with a row of Provence pinks, there are only so many times you can use the words ‘peach’, ‘strawberry’ and ‘creamy texture.’ Which is why you start to see the over-specific or increasingly baroque descriptors. Don’t just say ‘coffee’, say ‘Italian ristretto’, it’s not just ‘licorice’, it’s ‘melted licorice’. Don’t worry, it doesn’t have to make sense because most of Parker’s readers will just cut to the chase and look at the score. Much easier than wading through all that guff.

Hand-in-hand with the democratisation came vulgarity. In 1990s and ‘00s, a highly sexualised language about wine came in from writers such as Jay McInerney comparing wines to Pamela Anderson or, erm, Hattie Jacques. Or baffling references to cars: “If Dom Pérignon is the Porsche 911 Carrera of the wine world, then Dom Pérignon Rosé is the 911 Turbo.” So now you know! Even worse, wine auctioneer John Kapon would refer to wines as “call girls” or “t&a”. It all seems very dated now but this sort of of stuff was going on well into the mid-2010s. McInerney’s willy-waving set were beautifully skewered in the 2016 film Sour Grapes about wine forger Rudy Kurniawan.

While I’m happy to see the end of such rugby club language, today any anthropomorphism is frowned upon. 10 years ago it was quite normal for people to describe a wine as masculine and feminine, and of course, most people, unless they are being deliberately obtuse, the default setting for many on social media, would know what these mean. A masculine wine will be more tannic, alcoholic, sturdy etc while a feminine one will be lighter and more graceful because men are, on average, bigger, stronger and arguably less graceful than women. Though these two words are now frowned upon in progressive English-speaking circles, it’s still normal to hear French winemakers of either sex use them. It seems to me to be the apogee of cultural imperialism to tell people from countries with deep winemaking traditions like France or Italy how they can and can’t describe a wine.

Furthermore, even the UC Davis flavour wheel is now seen as exclusive because many people who come into wine won’t share the same culinary references as Amerine and his ilk. What if you’ve never tasted bacon and someone tells you the mnemonic for mature syrah is bacon fat? I think the mistake here is to take the UC Davis flavour-led way of describing wine at its own estimation. At best it’s a shorthand which you learn. Descriptions by American wine writers are full of references to cassis though most Americans will have never tasted blackcurrants. I’d been cheerfully nodding along to ‘wild strawberries’ in tasting notes without having ever tried one until I found some growing in our garden earlier this year.

The UC Davis way of describing wine is so entrenched that it’s easy to forget how new and potentially confusing it can be. Auberon Waugh wrote in the 1980s about being baffled by pinot noir described as tasting of cherries and smoke. He writes: “plainly cherries and smoke are the things to look for in an American pinot noir… it reads oddly to me only because neither cherries nor smoke have yet reached Europe as a way of describing wine, I have been eating cherries all my life and breathing in smoke for much of it, but I have never found a Burgundy which tasted of either – let alone of tobacco, perfume, rose petals or lavender.” Imagine what he would make of ‘minerality’?

I suspect that most of the fruit salad of words that we wine writers use to describe our speciality mean nothing to most drinkers. You have to train yourself, however haphazardly to recognise the those notes of ‘cassis’ and ‘stone fruit’ that seem self-evident to us wine bores. And, of course, everyone’s palate is different.

The truth is that there is no entirely accurate way of describing wine accurately and the faux objectivity of the flavour wheel approach flatters to deceive. It’s like the old adage about writing about music is like dancing about architecture. The worry is that well meaning attempts to make wine more accessible will have exactly the opposite effect. They will make people even more nervous to venture an opinion in case they stumble upon a verboten word. It might be my conspiratorial nature but I think that is part of the point, it keeps the gatekeepers in charge. Wine should be accessible but not too accessible or a lot of people are out of a job.

But more than this, an insistence on only using this pseudo-scientific language strips wine of its culture, context and meaning, rips it out of history, and puts it under the microscope. Where’s the fun in that? I’d rather we have some occasionally embarrassing or baffling writing than denatured blandness. Much of the criticism of colourful language is reminiscent of a recent story about Newcastle University putting words like ‘pet’ on the verboten list. Ignore the scolds, if you’re going to compare a wine to a woman or indeed a man, do it with a bit of style. As Waugh writes “wine writing should be camped up.” Oooh Matron, take them away!

Henry Jeffreys worked in the wine trade and publishing before becoming a writer. He won Fortnum & Mason Drink Writer of the Year 2022/23 and is the author of four books including Empire of Booze (2016) and Vines in a Cold Climate (2023).