Winespeak

It’s a unique tongue, the language of wine. Charles Jennings and Paul Keers highlight some of the amusing and often baffling parlance wine critics use, as well the notes we make from our own tastings

Charles Jennings and Paul Keers don’t mince their words

So you’vE bEEN drinking tolerably decent wine for a few years now, and you feel that maybe it’s time to move to the next division. you’ve mastered the ineffable difference between a grand cru and a generic bourgogne; you’re just about comfortable with tannins and structure; you can, with some difficulty, point to Coonawarra on a map. All that’s stopping you is the fact that a) you now have to acquire a huge amount of arcane additional knowledge – the equivalent of a study book combined with a car repair manual; and b) you have to be comfortable with the new diction that goes with it – the winespeak that shows you’re serious.

you know what I’m talking about. ‘Grippy’ you can learn to live with, likewise ‘minerality’. ‘biscuity nose’ and ‘graphite on the finish’ are a bit more of a stretch, but you’ve got time. but what’s this charging over the brow of the hill? A whole other army of winespeak, one that resembles nothing you’ve come across before. Here’s a red (and I’m not making this up) which evokes ‘a clove cigarette enjoyed in the rain’. This Sonoma valley Chardonnay is defined by ‘a teasing sense of crystalline minerality’, while this Grenache-Carignan mix is ‘a perfect liquid oval’. one burgundy contains ‘a grid of tannins’, while yet another is ‘broad-shouldered and narrow-waisted’. To say nothing of ‘linear core’ and ‘Mexican chocolate’.

Wait – what exactly is this? It seems to be nothing less than a kind of antilanguage. or, to put it another way, the point at which language and meaning part company before your eyes.

There are two reasons for this. one is that the number of descriptors available for wine appreciation is pretty small – especially when you consider the thousands of wines to

be talked about – so wine buffs press unfamiliar, sometimes unintelligible, words and images into service just so they don’t bore themselves. There are, after all, only so many ways you can combine ‘body’, ‘red’ and ‘full’.

The other reason is solipsism – the way the drinking experience exists in the drinker’s own personal universe. Unlike an opera or an art exhibition, there’s no common event, no objective correlative (unless you’re discussing the label on the bottle, say) against which to test your assertions. What goes on inside a few cubic centimetres in your head is pretty much the only thing that matters. A quality like damp roof tiles? Why not? No feather boas or rhinestone sneakers? Could very well be.

Obviously, this has more than a whiff of the-inmates-taking-over-theasylum – anything goes, provided it’s dressed up with a bit of gilt and ormolu and delivered with sufficiently bonkers conviction. The upshot? Actually, no, I don’t do winespeak, nor do I want to, because that, my friend, is the fast track to the madhouse. No, all I want from my winespeak is a kind of graven simplicity – something along the lines of: there are three flavours of wine; red, white and… what’s the other one called? CJ

Note to self…

It’s one thing reading tasting notes. What happens when we come to write them? I’m not talking about notes for an audience, but notes for yourself. Because that’s what we have to do, as soon as we start a modest cellar, and start keeping enough wines, for enough time, that we need to keep track of each one.

But reading notes is not the same as writing them. I read art reviews, I rely on recipes, I’m inspired by the poetry of TS Eliot – but I don’t write in the language of any of them. In fact, I gave up winespeak when I suffered months of derision from CJ, after I declared that an Echezeaux Grand Cru 2007 from Labouré Roi, at one tasting was ‘like choral evensong’.

And I get little practice, because the rest of what I swallow doesn’t seem to require tasting notes. Even in a crowded freezer I don’t make notes on food. ‘Tastes of fish’ is an unnecessary note to append to fish fingers. Nor do I hang little tags from my cans of baked beans, reading: ‘Heinz, 2016, redolent of tomatoes. Reminiscent of cannellini bean. Hints of tin. Ready to eat.’

Wine writers are usually in the fortunate position of recommending wines. There aren’t the column inches to waste describing something they’ve rejected. But for those of us who buy wines, notes often fall into a category best described as hazard warnings. It’s rare that those rating the merits of, say, this year’s Domaine de la RomanéeConti, find themselves using similes of cleaning products, or noticing aromas of old lift shafts. These are notes I make to remind myself not to succumb to that particular bargain ever again. One supermarket Bordeaux was, I see in my notes, ‘reminiscent in the mouth of a leaking Biro’.

In such circumstances nuance is, frankly, unnecessary. When one decides that a wine tastes primarily of petrol, it’s irrelevant whether it’s unleaded or not. And why bother even noting the poor wines? To remind and educate yourself. And because you take the remaining bottles to the kind of party at which you won’t have to drink the wine you brought. Or to see the hosts ever again.

When it comes to the positives, I find that my winespeak retreats into the personal. After all, I’m the only person to whom it needs to make sense. To describe a wine’s body, I use the term ‘heft’. It might not mean anything to you, but it works for me. (As it did for Thomas Phaer, who first used it in 1558.)

And I use the distinctive flavours of family cooking. A delicate scented sweetness? I noted that one white wine was simply ‘Raff’s poached pears’. I suspect you haven’t had them.

There, perhaps, is the fundamental difference. Winespeak needs to communicate; but your own notes need only communicate with one person – yourself. And at least you can trust the taste of the person who’s speaking it. PK

‘One supermarket Bordeaux was, in my notes, reminiscent in the mouth of a leaking Biro’ PK