How to Speak Wine Language

You've heard the stereotypical yuppies and sophisticates yammering on about "notes of pumpkin and blackcurrant" or "oaky with a hint of vanilla." Pretty ridiculous but, believe it or not, it serves a purpose.

First you need to understand what the current system replaced. It used to be - at least in the English-speaking world - that you'd describe a wine as you'd describe a person. Feminine or refined, masculine or insouciant. Unfortunately, while it created interesting mental pictures, it wasn't particularly good at conveying what the wine tasted like.

So now wine writers try to describe what it tastes like. The problem is, wine doesn't really taste like anything other than wine, mostly, except around the edges. So when a critic describes a wine as "buttery," it doesn't taste much like butter, or even movie popcorn "butter," but there's a thickness and unctuousness that's more butterlike than winelike. Throw in some of the more useful bits of the previous system, like "flabby" for a wine that's not acidic enough and just sits there in your mouth (sort of like buttery in a bad way), and you have a somewhat workable system.

The major advantage of this method is, you can verify it. If a wine writer detects a hint of blackberry in a wine, and nobody else does, that writer might not stay a writer much longer. And at least this way you have some idea of what you're getting.