Focus on the quality
A recent article in the New Yorker focused on the proliferation of descriptors that are applied to wine these days — the aromas and flavours of all kinds of fruit, berries, spices, flora, and minerals, not to mention “hard-ridden horse,” “seaside,” and other phrases that are intended to convey to the reader what the wine reviewer has smelled or tasted.
The author cited a telling example: two tasting notes by a wellknown wine writer of the same wine, but 17 years apart. In 1992 it took James Suckling 19 words to describe the 1989 Haut-Brion: “Big and meaty, with lots of fruit and full tannins, but featuring a sweetness and silkiness on the finish.” In 2009, it took him seven sentences, and apart from using descriptors related to cigarettes, pastries, and saunas, he wrote of “perfumed aromas of subtle milk chocolate, cedar, and sweet tobacco.”
Granted, all wine reviewers are terse sometimes and verbose at others (it sometimes depends on the deadline) but the shift here shows how pervasive these descriptors have become. And although many people coming to wine-tasting for the first time find it difficult to put words to smells and flavours, they soon pick it up. It’s the easy part of describing wine, which is why so many reviews by not-very-good tasters are filled with these descriptors and not much else.
The thing is that these descriptors don’t tell you anything about the quality of a wine, which, as I see it, is the whole point of a wine review. Any bottle of plonk has aromas and flavours. The poorest Chardonnay might smell and taste of apples and peaches and so might a wonderful Chardonnay. Wines are distinguished by other qualities, and while complexity is one of them, that doesn’t mean that you can detect more flavours. It has to do with the structure of the wine.
If you watch some professionals, you can see that what they aim for is a longer and longer list of descriptors, apparently in the belief that the more nuances and hints they can detect, the cleverer they are. But what’s the point? Do you need a dozen descriptors, or will three or four do? Or none at all? The New Yorker piece (new-yorker.com/culture/culture-desk/is-there-a-betterway-to-talk-about-wine) suggests the movement is away from this nonsense, and that’s music to my ears, as I gave up using these aromas and flavour descriptors years ago. I like James Suckling’s 1992 review better than the other one.