Wine Bill Knott

JARGON

Every trade has its own language. Economists talk of demand curves and GDP; musicians of antiphons and cadenzas; computer boffins wax lyrical about motherboards and peripherals.

Wine writers have their own jargon, too: the trouble is that we are generally supposed to be helping non-specialists, not simply talking to each other. ‘Winespeak’ has probably been lampooned more than any other professional argot: sometimes it is deliberately obscure, sometimes pretentiously flowery, often just impenetrably pompous. ‘It’s a rustic little wine, but I think you’ll be amused by its presumption’ – that kind of thing.

Obscurity is unforgiveable. Take the blackcurrant aroma that you might find in a young Cabernet Sauvignon, a smell described in the wine world as cassis: I would be interested to know how many bottles of crème de cassis are sold in the UK every year compared with Ribena. A couple of generations of young Britons probably haven’t smelt ‘pencil shavings’ either, while the aroma of a cigar box is something familiar only to a privileged few (many of them tweed-suited wine merchants, I suspect).

I once read a tasting note that rhapsodised about the merits of a particular Muscat, finishing with the daring description ‘almost grapey’. I sort of know what the writer meant, though: the grape is – as far as I know – unique among fruits in that, when fermented, it manages to smell and taste of almost anything except grapes. Muscat is one of the few varieties whose wines often do smell ‘grapey’.

The latest buzzword is ‘minerality’, a term that usually refers to the flavours and aromas in wine that are not fruity, herbal, flowery or spicy: perhaps the smell of chalk on a blackboard, or rain on a pavement, or oysters in the shell. Many wine professionals have attributed these flavours to the soils and rocks through which vine roots delve for sustenance, tying the process into their notion of terroir.

Rather than merely being obscure, flowery or pompous, this – according to Professor Alex Maltman of Aberystwyth University – is just plain wrong. Vines cannot transmit minerals from bedrock to bottle: moreover, the minerals that are present in wine bear little relation to those propping up the vineyard; are present in minuscule amounts; and don’t taste of very much anyway. What everyone is now describing as ‘mineral’ flavours in wine (and it was an adjective hardly used a decade ago) must in fact be organic in nature, and nothing to do with geology.

The minerality furore is an example of what happens when two professional languages collide. As a tasting note, ‘mineral’ doesn’t have to mean what geologists mean by it, any more than ‘petrolly’ as a note for an old Riesling means that someone has squirted some four-star into the bottle. Prof Maltman doesn’t deny the importance of a vineyard’s soil type (sampling wines from a few hundred yards apart in, say, Burgundy would convince anyone of that): his quibble is that wine writers assert that they are actually tasting these minerals.

He goes on to debunk the ideas that the liquorice flavour attributed to Priorat wines comes from the soil, and that Chablis – with its marine fossil-rich limestone soils – produces wines that somehow smell of iodine and the sea. In fact, says Professor Maltman, there is less iodine (four parts per billion) in Chablis than in wines from nearby Corton, and less than half the levels found in some New World Chardonnays.

The idea of flint gets a slating, too: it is a kind of silica, and no more likely to affect the flavour of your wine than the bottle or the glass, which are also made from silica. The moral seems to be that we wine writers should stick to describing what we taste, rather than speculating about that of which we know little.