Esther Mobley

Language of wine comes with a bouquet of baggage.

Wine language is so often absurd that it’s a punch line. Notes of smoldering tobacco or forest underbrush or underripe Jonagold apple — it sounds almost farcical in its specificity. Even worse is when the descriptor is inedible. How many people have actually tasted a wet river stone, anyway?

But now, it’s becoming clearer than ever that the conventional language used to describe wine isn’t merely intimidating and opaque. It’s also inextricable from racism and sexism, excluding dimensions of flavor that are unfamiliar to the white, Western cultures that dominate the world of fine wine and reinforcing retrograde notions of gender.

I’m always thinking about words, but this summer, I’ve been thinking about language in new ways, particularly in how seemingly innocuous words can have a larger impact. As the country confronts its entrenched social inequities with fresh urgency, the world of wine has experienced a radical call to action, too. My conversations with wine professionals like Jirka Jireh and Martin Reyes for a recent story about the need to improve wine education for BIPOC really put into focus just how limited and unwelcoming the established wine lexicon can be.

The conventional words used to talk about the taste of wine may be excluding large groups of people from wine, as both makers and drinkers. For starters: The vocabulary used for fine wine is nearly exclusively rooted in flavors and aromas familiar to western Europe. This idea came up a lot in recent discussions about the wine industry’s lack of racial diversity, especially with Jireh, who told me that early in her career she was conditioned to “mold” her palate to a French ideal, even though French flavors weren’t evocative for her.

Consider the extent to which French words have crept into Englishlanguage wine talk. A Blanc de Blancs sparkling wine tastes like brioche. Inky Cabernet Sauvignons recall cassis, a flavor of concentrated, ripe black currants. Grenache blends have the distinctive taste of garrigue — a specific combination of herbs like lavender and sage that grow near the Mediterranean coast.

It’s not surprising that French words dominate the American wine imagination; most of this country’s wine tradition is imported from France. But these terms carry considerable class baggage with them. Some of the most common wine descriptors refer specifically to food preparations from the annals of classical French gastronomy: pate de fruit (a jellied fruit candy), coulis (a fruit sauce), fleur de sel (very fancy salt). To understand these tastes, it’s not enough to enter the words into Google translate — it actually requires a lived experience of Michelinstarred dining. It took me years of hearing “pate de fruit” in a wine context before I could actually find one to taste.

Understanding these tastes is more than an exercise in figuring out what you personally enjoy; it’s often requisite for getting ahead in the wine world. Most of the existing wine classes — the ones that many sommeliers need to advance in their careers — demand familiarity with this wineflavor lexicon. Winery owners and winemakers need fluency in this language in order to interact with distributors, retailers and customers. Given all that, it can hardly be surprising that less than 1% of U.S. wineries have a Black owner or winemaker: Exclusionary language is a part of that larger exclusion.

Of course, there are exceptions. Certain descriptors like Chinese five spice, rooibos tea, hoisin and lemongrass have crept into the mainstream, used frequently even by the highestprofile critics. The dialect is richer for these terms. And just imagine how much richer it could be: In an article for Punch, New York sommelier Miguel de Leon wrote about his associations with the flavors of the Filipino food he was raised on: a Chenin Blanc reminds him of jackfruit, a Cabernet Franc of tamarind candy.

I’ve been complicit in the shortcomings of wine descriptors. I learned how to talk about wine from the highend wineries and upscale restaurants where I worked at the beginning of my career, and in my earlier years as a wine writer, I definitely overused terms that probably sounded erudite to me at the time like sous bois, which refers to the distinctive smell of the forest floor. (I could have just written “forest floor.”)

Part of the issue is that there will always be a tension between specificity and accessibility. I want to get at the most exact word to describe what I’m tasting, but the more precise I get, the more likely it is to alienate people. Gooseberry may be the most concise way to express a particular flavor frequently found in Sauvignon Blanc, but many people who do most of their produce shopping at California Safeway locations are not likely to have ever eaten one. Words like that can be so perfect that they become unhelpful. And trading the French set of overly specific flavor descriptors for a panglobal set isn’t necessarily a worthy goal: The wetriverstone problem in another dialect is still a problem.

The temptation, at least for me, is to err on the side of specificity. Just as a sommelier can adapt their register to the formality of their specific restaurant, I write with an audience in mind. My typical reader can read in English, lives in the Bay Area, probably knows what a persimmon tastes like.

But accessibility needs to become more of a priority, too. As wine fights to diversify its industry makeup and, hopefully, its consumer base, it will have to get used to new registers of speech in settings where “garrigue” doesn’t carry a lot of currency. It’s not that western European flavors should be vilified, or use of French restricted; it’s that the dictionary should be expanded. And as new pathways are created to usher in a more diverse new generation of wine professionals, the resources to do that expansion will grow.

The daunting changes around how we talk about wine are not without precedent. This conversation picks up on a conversation that’s been happening for a few years now, about wine language’s sexist implications.

For example, it’s commonplace to describe wines as “masculine” or “feminine.” A masculine wine, we’re meant to understand, is aggressive and muscular; a feminine one, delicate and floral. I’ve used these terms myself in the past, but I won’t in the future — not only because this winegender binary feels like it adheres to an outdated, irrelevant set of gender norms, but also because it happens to be vague and unhelpful. Sexism aside, these terms fall into the same obnoxious camp as “wet river stone.”

And masculine and feminine are innocuous compared with some of the sexist wine language that has passed as normal for many years. It astounds me that the word “slutty” — used to describe a wine whose appeal is obvious, rather than subtle — remains in circulation. (“Slutty” in a wine context is almost always used pejoratively, not used to summon the reclaimedfeminism, owningmybody attitude that the word lately has come to inhabit in some circles.) More than once, I’ve heard the critic Jay McInerney discuss why he thinks comparing a wine to Pamela Anderson (implying it’s rich and voluptuous) as opposed to Kate Moss (implying it’s lean and taut) is a useful way to describe it.

This kind of language, quite brazenly, assumes that its readers all share a leering, heterosexual male perspective — a dangerous assumption, since 54% of U.S. wine drinkers are women, according to 2019 Wine Market Council data.

But overtly gendered language has been falling out of favor in recent years, rightfully so. That’s a testament to this very rarefied, privileged discipline’s ability to change its own norms, and proof that a deeper examination of the racial and classbased undertones is possible.

Attempting to convey the taste of a wine through written words is never an easy task, and I’m not sure I ever really get it right. Part of the work, certainly, has to do with deliberately exposing oneself to new flavors, something that happens to be very feasible when you live in the Bay Area. Another part of it is really, truly paying attention to those flavors, whether it’s the pungent saltiness of XO sauce or the mouthwatering tang of umeboshi.

Doing this work has another element: It can make the language of wine tasting less limited, less contraining and less dull.

Then again, talking about wine isn’t just about fruits and flowers and sauces. Sometimes, the exercise of conveying what a wine tastes like may require a little more imagination.

The best example of this that I know is the word “petrichor.” It’s a delightfully compact word that means “the smell after the rain,” and it’s one of the most evocative wine descriptors I’ve ever heard. Yes, it’s an esoteric Greek derivative. It’s not available at Safeway. But the fragrance and the feeling it evokes, it seems to me, are universally intelligible.