One of the comments I most often hear when giving a corporate wine seminar is: “I know what I like when I taste it, but I don’t know how to describe it.”
It makes sense. Describing wine is incredibly hard. So hard, that most us revert to using the language of food to describe wine. We say that a wine tastes “like cherries” or “like chocolate” or like a hundred different foods.
And that makes sense too. Because for the last 8,000 years, wine’s closest companion has been food. In fact, the two are so close that they are often thought of as inseparable. (As one example, in Italy when someone drinks too much, they don’t say, “he drank too much.” They say, “he hasn’t eaten enough food yet.”)
But despite the affinity between wine and food, when it comes to language, wine and food are different. In a very practical sense, food is its own language and wine is not.
For example, if I give you a strawberry and ask what does this taste like?, you say a strawberry. Great. We are agreed. It is a strawberry. It tastes like a strawberry. We call that flavor strawberry, and we all know what it means.
But if I give you a Cabernet Franc and ask what does this taste like? and you say Cabernet Franc … well, that’s not very helpful. Because wine is not its own inherent language. As a result, most of us describe wine by resorting to comparing its flavor to objects whose meanings are generally agreed upon. We might say, for example, that a wine tastes like raspberries or like lemons. In fact, if we couldn’t use metaphors, our wine vocabulary would probably shrink to just a few words that describe the five basic tastes we all share (sweet, sour, bitter, salty, savory).
Faced with the lack of an inherent language to describe wine flavor, it’s not surprising that wine drinkers invent their own. Of course, you might find some descriptions a bit over-the-top (it’s a precocious little wine and its femininity is alluring…). But the truth is that these creative, if idiosyncratic, attempts to describe wine do carry some meaning that can orient the taster. Most people, for example, know what’s meant when a wine is described as powerful, massive, or soft. Describing a wine as being as “soft as a flannel blanket” is just going one step further in the attempt to describe something we love to drink.
Public Speaker and Wine Consultant
Karen MacNeil combines world-class expertise, an engaging presence, and trusted consulting insights. To collaborate with Karen or book her for your next event.
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