Do you speak wine? | Financial Times

Think about all those TV cooking shows. What is their weakest element? Surely it’s when the experts try to describe what they are tasting. All too often we have to content ourselves with “delicious”, “yummy” or just “mmm!”.

As I know only too well, taste is almost impossible to describe. The process of tasting is so hidden, so private, so internal that the impressions that result from it cannot be extracted and observed by anyone else to be compared and discussed. Which leaves professional tasters, such as wine writers like me, grasping for parallels between the flavours and aromas they sense and those of actual objects. Fruits and flowers are especially popular in this context.

What is less subjective, for wine anyway, is what can be measured analytically: levels of alcohol, acidity, sweetness and tannin — all of which can be sensed by the tasting equipment in our mouths as well as in a lab. In my own descriptions, I try to highlight any extremes in these features of a wine, what one might call its vital statistics, as well as observations on its state of maturity and its quality. But it’s the aromas, or flavours, that are so difficult to describe, even though the equipment in our noses is so much more sophisticated than that in our mouths.

Over the past few decades, as interest in wine has grown, descriptions — so-called tasting notes — have become ever more extravagant, typically including a long list of flavours. These days, consumers are likely to encounter something like “dried strawberry, iodine, oyster shell, wet earth, fresh mushrooms, flowers, ripe dark peaches and nectarines” or indeed “rich blood plum flavours intersected with blackberry with a spicy edge and some flinty, graphite notes”. All this is in stark contrast to the pithy description in James Thurber’s 1937 cartoon of a dinner party: “It’s a naïve domestic burgundy without any breeding, but I think you’ll be amused by its presumption.”

Yet change is coming. As Esther Mobley, wine writer of the San Francisco Chronicle, put it at the recent Symposium for Professional Wine Writers: “There is widespread agreement that the language we use to talk about wine is broken.”

The beauty of this year’s symposium was that instead of being attended by a dozen wine writers in Napa Valley’s luxurious Meadowood resort, it was online and open to a far broader cross-section of wine communicators from all over the world. Not surprisingly, there was much disgruntlement at the way wine language is still dominated by western norms.

As the London-based English editor or co-author of at least three standard wine reference books, I am presumably in the direct line of fire. As must be the Wine & Spirit Education Trust (WSET), the global leader in wine education, whose courses are studied in more than 70 countries, but which is also based in London. In the 1990s, a standardised “systematic approach to tasting wine” was devised by the WSET in which students were — and still are — encouraged to use a fairly limited set of descriptors.

Because the WSET provides the foundation for so many wine lovers’ knowledge, these few descriptors dominate many drinkers’ vocabulary. Yet they are far from universal. There have been complaints from Asia, for example, that some of the fruits mentioned — gooseberries come up a lot — are virtually unknown there.

According to Ian Harris, WSET chief executive, the organisation started on a plan to move away from the Eurocentricity of its tasting vocabulary last year, but the results are unlikely to be seen for some time, not least because many of their course materials are printed.

Now that the make-up of wine consumers, students and media is at long last widening, the calls for wine writing to be more inclusive and accessible are becoming louder. At the recent symposium, Haitian-American Regine Rousseau, who runs the marketing platform Shall We Wine, argued for “the poetic as well as for traditional tasting notes. But most of all we need to make room for other voices and cultures.”

As an employee of WSET, Barbadian-American Deniece M Bourne was in a difficult position and defended her organisation’s tasting vocabulary on the basis that it is comprehensible to the greatest number of their students. Yet it was clear that she’s also itching for change: “People want experiences now. I think you should bring your own to the wine.”

Mobley’s panel certainly did when asked to describe the same wine . . . Rousseau conjured up molasses, wet coconut shell, Scotch bonnet pepper and more. I was cheered when Joseph Hernandez, born in the Philippines and raised in California, mentioned Robitussin in his tasting note as I quite often find aromas in wines that I associate with cough linctus.

Everyone agreed that there is considerable work to be done on wine vocabulary, but the greatest scorn was reserved for tasting notes such as “masculine”, “feminine” and “sexy”. Hernandez in particular resented anyone’s presumption that they knew what he regarded as sexy.

I guiltily did a quick search of the 200,000+ tasting notes published on JancisRobinson.com since 2000 and — sure enough — found 192 masculines, 147 feminines and 37 sexys, although many of them were quotes from producers or were preceded by the get-out adverb “stereotypically”.

So how to proceed from here? None of us can escape our personal experiences. Having written nearly 100,000 of those tasting notes, I am sure I’m guilty of writing a good portion of extremely dull ones. I certainly agree that intensely personal reactions to individual wines are much more interesting than long lists of flavours. I don’t honestly think anyone gets up in the morning intent on finding a wine that tastes of dried strawberry, iodine, oyster shell, wet earth et al. And the fact that we all vary considerably in our sensitivities to various compounds makes these impressions ineluctably personal anyway. More useful surely is to alert people to whether a wine is especially tart, old, strong, syrupy etc. And to describe it, if possible, by telling its story, or the story of one’s interaction with it.

I doubt it would fit into the WSET’s systematic approach but I love it if a wine has such a strong personality that I can’t stop myself anthropomorphising it — which may puzzle some readers, but at least it can help to distinguish it.

Harold McGee, food science writer, author of Nose Dive and keen observer of tasting notes, wrote to me recently: “Now all the good stuff seems to be ‘expressive’ and ‘precise’ and ‘linear’. Oddly more and more abstract — maybe a symptom of our digital times?”

There are undoubtedly fashions in tasting terms. I provide observations on just a few current favourites.

Follow Jancis on Twitter @JancisRobinson

Follow @FTMag on Twitter to find out about our latest stories first.