Supplement to Winespeak
I
t’s white, or it’s red — what more’s to be said?
Well, plenty. “A bottle of wine,” Louis Pasteur observed, “contains more philosophy than all the books in the world”. But how to pry into the wine and tease its insights out? How to tell what they’re about? And then — how do we say it?
Next time you’re with friends in a restaurant, in a bar, at a dinner party, or just at home with the top knocked off a bottle — try describing the wine, what you smell and what you taste, and ask your companions for their thoughts.
Description has the power to complete an experience. Just by putting a wine into words you’ll make greater sense of what you taste. And it’ll taste better. Hearing how others describe the same wine will also add a vicarious dimension to the pleasure.
You haven’t really tasted a wine until you’ve tried describing it
You haven’t really tasted a wine until you’ve tried describing it. Your words give the wine a personality (as well as reflecting your own). Never mind whether you’re novice or expert — what matters is giving meaning in your own way to what you’re drinking. Without that… well, even the finest wine is just so much liquid in a glass.
Look in your mouth for what your nose has already noticed. (“Smell and taste form a single sense”, said Brillat-Savarin, history’s greatest gourmand.) Your focus initially will be on flavour — go beyond the obvious. As you scent a wine’s perfume and roll it over your tongue, look for nuance and subtleties. They’re not, by their nature, showy. But they make up much of a wine’s true nature.
(Sure, that Puligny Montrachet might taste like face-slamming a bowl of peaches and cream — so delicious in itself that what else matters? Yet… isn’t it the barely-perceptible note of cinnamon, the tinge of exoticism, that’s the making of that wine?)
Real pleasure is in the peculiarities. And wines, just like us, want to be loved as much for their idiosyncrasies as for their more obvious qualities.
Description doesn’t, of course, begin and end with flavour. There’s always a place for metaphor (likening a wine, if you like, to something it’s clearly unlike to get to a more poetic likeness)…
Is this wine animal, vegetable or mineral…?
Is it Raphael, Vermeer, Monet or Hockney…?
How does it marry with what you’re eating — a marriage of passion or convenience, easy harmony or deep connection, opposites attracting or familiarity breeding whatever…?
Is it a symphony or suite, sonata or
cantata, fantasia or fugue, blues, jazz, rock ballad, electronica or even
metal…? (Tasted in sequence one evening — a Volnay that was every bit the first
movement of Beethoven’s Sixth, a Gevrey Chambertin that was the last movement
of his Ninth, and a
Is this wine a languorous swim in a blue ocean, a quest for some elusive truth, or an adrenalin-charged bottomless bungee-jump…?
Such a whimsical approach to wine will greatly enhance your appreciation
(Such a whimsical approach to wine will greatly enhance your appreciation. Rest assured it’s nothing at all like the tedious excesses of wine tragics, who tend to lack what’s really needed here — a sense of humor, and a life. Expanding the range of your wine description will improve your palate, and your palate-memory. Sure, you already know for the most part what you like — but it’s illuminating, not to say reassuring, to know why you like something. Or why you don’t. And it’s enlightening for the future, when you can bring a certain wine to mind again, recapture how it was and compare it to some different vintage, region, style…)
Think, then, you and your drinking companions — if this wine were a person, who would it be?
Or, let’s not be so one dimensional. Wines, and people, possess a multitude of attributes. So nominate a characteristic of that wine that is shared by one of your drinking party. Chance your arm, there are no wrong answers and difference of opinion is sauce to discussion. Now, pick a different personality trait typical of both the wine and someone else at the table. And so on… (assuming, of course, you’re game.)
The same wine might, for instance (a
Cornas from the Rhone, or a Barossa
Equally, a young Chablis or Clare riesling might be viewed as recalcitrant, enigmatic, diffident, terse, taciturn or promising…
It’s true that comparisons will likely become more outlandish as the evening unfolds and more bottles are uncorked. Perhaps more pointed, and even more to the point. (“In vino veritas” and all that, or as Robert Browning had it, “I promised, if you’d watch a dinner out, / We’d see truth dawn together? — truth that peeps / Over the glasses’ edge…”)
If you’re concerned, then, about companions’ sharp tongues and friends falling out — pick on celebrities instead. They’re fair game for all.
Who might this be (raising a glass
of inexpensive
Paris Hilton for sure — attention-seeking, outrageously popular, entirely vapid and eminently forgettable…
These and other reflections on the how’s, why’s and wherefore’s of describing wine are the subject of the upcoming book “Drinking Your Own Words”, available pre-Xmas.
