New Yorker: Is there a better way to talk about wine?

[JimHow]

http://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultur ... est?reload

[AKR]

I'm wondering if I should get a subscription to the Wine Spectator now. The few times I remember reading Matt Kramer I liked his columns.

Good article.

They dissected minerality as a descriptor, but I think some wines do smell of stone and slate. Maybe there is so scientific explanation for that. But I smell that over and over from certain appellations.

[AlexR]

The author writes "A 2007 study published in the Journal of Wine Economics gave amateur drinkers two different glasses of Bordeaux along with a professional critic’s tasting notes, and asked them to match each review with the correct glass….The subjects performed no better at identifying each wine than if they’d guessed at random".

The key here is, of course *amateur drinkers*.

Switched-on wine lovers or wine professionals do NOT seek to describe rare wines for John Q. Public. Should that come as a suprise?
Wine vocabulary is described as "fuzzy". Well, it has to be by nature, and subjective as well.
Do we really need a study to find that "reviewers reserve florid prose for expensive bottles and use simpler, more pedestrian language to describe Twi Buck Chucks”???

Thinking of wine descriptors in terms of chemistry is a big mistake IMHO. I have often tasted with oenologists. They have a *very* different way of appraising wines. In my opinion, it is not suited to the subtleties of the finest wines.

I don’t think anyone, even many years down the road, will be able to objectively describe a La Tâche or Lafite Rothschild. In fact, these wines' inability to be reduced to a few words anyone anywhere will understand is their strength.

Alex R.

[AlohaArtakaHoundsong]

OK like most New Yorker stuff I will read it over the next several days - it will take me that long. But so far, I agree with everything in it even though I don't understand it.

You can put me in both camps, or if there are more than two, in most if not all of them.

Some observations and I am not bashing anybody or anything.

In general I enjoy tasting notes way more than the related wine or even any wine. I'm serious. Not my tasting notes, yours.

I said this years ago and will repeat it now. When I eat a peach it just tastes like a peach. Not white flowers, "after the rain", garrigue, asphalt or pine needles - or wine. Yet when I drink some German wines peaches come to mind. No denying it.

I'm part Italian and maybe this is why I get the part about the Romans (or Suckling circa 1992). I'm in that camp of "it's big, it's subtle, it's warm, it's cutting, it's da da da.

Beyond the basics I often get some single sort of discernible flavor or aroma. Beyond that there is this evocativeness-es: Old library, you know the kind.

I'm not sure anything ("hedonic" versus whatever it is versus) is really helpful. I can't really correlate my findings with anybody elses consistently. Not that I've tried it just seems that way. Although Arv and I used surprinsigly similar words and impressions regarding the 95 Croix du Casse for having it 5-10 years apart in totally different parts of the world and for all I know different barometric pressures.

[AKR]

The author writes "A 2007 study published in the Journal of Wine Economics gave amateur drinkers two different glasses of Bordeaux along with a professional critic’s tasting notes, and asked them to match each review with the correct glass….The subjects performed no better at identifying each wine than if they’d guessed at random".

The key here is, of course *amateur drinkers*.

Switched-on wine lovers or wine professionals do NOT seek to describe rare wines for John Q. Public. Should that come as a suprise?
Wine vocabulary is described as "fuzzy". Well, it has to be by nature, and subjective as well.
Do we really need a study to find that "reviewers reserve florid prose for expensive bottles and use simpler, more pedestrian language to describe Twi Buck Chucks”???

Thinking of wine descriptors in terms of chemistry is a big mistake IMHO. I have often tasted with oenologists. They have a *very* different way of appraising wines. In my opinion, it is not suited to the subtleties of the finest wines.

I don’t think anyone, even many years down the road, will be able to objectively describe a La Tâche or Lafite Rothschild. In fact, these wines' inability to be reduced to a few words anyone anywhere will understand is their strength.

Alex R.

I would suggest that asking even experienced tasters to differentiate between two 2000 St Juliens, based solely on written tastings notes compared to experienced taste, would be very difficult. I wouldn't expect it to be anything better than random.

I don't think that's a very good test. More useful would be differentiate between comparable quality wines from different regions - maybe syrah from the Rhone vs. Australia, or cabernet from Napa vs. the Medoc.

[DavidG]

Fun article. There's plenty of room for BS in wine criticism. It seems natural to me to compare what we taste and smell to things that they remind us of. Most TNs are approximations. And there's a huge subjective component. I've seen many instances of a specific descriptor suddenly being confirmed by many around the table once one taster voices it. It's happened to me. Breaking it down into chemical descriptions like thiols or pyrazines seems a step in the wrong direction. I don't want a clinical, objective (as if that were really possible) deconstruction of a wine. I want subjective impressions. Whether it's a list of 6 or 7 smells and tastes or a description of structure or where a wine is on the aging curve or just a "wow, this blew my hair back!" - all are interesting to me. I expect more detail from critics - something about smells and structure and ageability - than I do from "non-professional" notes, but sometimes the less detailed notes from people here tell me more than a whole paragraph of details from Parker or Suckling or whomever.