Wine talk has long been a soft target for satire. The pomposity and pretension, the anxiety about class, the seemingly random free-association and accidental surrealism … it was all gently skewered, as early as 1937, when the New Yorker published James Thurber’s cartoon, where a dinner party host discusses “a naïve domestic Burgundy, without any breeding, but I’m sure you’ll be amused by its presumption”.
But wine terminology and its written form, the tasting note, have proved remarkably resilient to ridicule. Indeed, the past 20 years has seen a huge growth in tasting notes, whether they’re the work of paid professionals or produced by amateurs on social media, wine forums and blogs. As journalist Bianca Bosker, also in the New Yorker, pointed out last year, the wine tasting note isn’t just more widespread than ever before. Its style and conventions often inform writing about beer, chocolate, coffee, cheese and even marijuana.
The trend for piling up pedantically precise adjectives (not just strawberries but crushed strawberries; morello rather than plain old cherries; tapenade rather than olives) is more pronounced in the United States, where the fruit-salad school of tasting note was pioneered and popularised by über-critic Robert Parker. But the more serious point explored by Bosker – that tasting notes of the floridly adjectival or metaphorical kind are confusing and without connection to the thing they purport to describe – is no less valid in the UK.
My wine-loving friends, who are openly contemptuous of the whole enterprise, fall into two camps. The aesthetes feel that the experience of drinking wine is almost beyond the reach of verbal expression so involves the juggling of a random assortment of associations, from mulberries and pencil shavings to leather, rocks and mulch from the forest floor.
The empiricists crave data. This camp, many of them winemakers, would be happier reading a note entirely based on a wine’s composition – not just acidity, sugar content, grape variety and alcohol, but also the levels of flavour and aroma compounds such as esters, terpenes, pyrazines and thiols.
This is not as dry as it sounds. For those familiar with the jargon, reading a purely technical breakdown is akin to a skilled musician’s reading of sheet music: it enables them to piece together the basic structure and some of the wine’s flavours in their mind.
But just as a reading of sheet music lacks the warmth and force of a specific performance, so a purely scientific note lacks any sense of a wine’s individuality.
The best notes, the ones that make me want to drink the wine described, will always have some element of “fruit-salad” about them. But the descriptors won’t be pulled from a thesaurus at random: they act as code for those flavour and aroma compounds – a green pepper or peapod note in your sauvignon means high levels of pyrazine, while the roses in your gewürztraminer indicate terpenes and a prickle of heat suggests high alcohol content.
A really good tasting note will also give you a sense of something more elusive: of the wine’s flow and feel, of how the flavours dovetail both with each other and with the wine’s texture, of its context in nature and the world of winemaking. All the things, in fact, that make a wine worth drinking, and, despite the inevitable ridicule, talking and writing about.
Six wines to write home about
Sainsbury’s Taste the Difference Touraine Sauvignon, Loire, France 2014 (£8, Sainsbury’s)
Thiols and pyrazines and high acidity, or, if you prefer, gooseberry, grass, elderflower and citrus, come together in this racy clean-cut Loire sauvignon. A good value alternative to sancerre and pouilly-fumé.
Marks & Spencer Dolcetto d’Asti, Italy 2014 (£7, M&S)
The dolcetto variety, the ingredient of many a Piedmontese restaurant’s house wine, always gives a good impression of inky, finger-staining black cherry juice, and this is no exception. It’s a simple, joyful, refreshing, crunchy red.
Villiera Traditional Barrel-Fermented Chenin Blanc, Stellenbosch, South Africa 2015 (£12, Marks & Spencer)
The notes of cream, toast and honey are the result of fermenting this wine in oak barrels, the fuller texture, too. But the experience is nothing like sucking on a plank: the classic Chenin Cox’s apple tang (it doesn’t taste like a Pink Lady) shines through.
Wynns Black Label Cabernet Sauvignon, Coonawarra, Australia 2010 (£15.99, Waitrose)
An Australian classic that dates back to 1954, this has all the hallmarks of cabernet sauvignon from the Coonawarra region: pure, ripe blackcurrant, a suave ample feel, and a subtle herbal note that may or may not have something to do with nearby eucalyptus trees.
David Reynaud Crozes-Hermitage Rouge Beaumont, Rhône, France 2013 (£19, Vinoteca)
My favourite red from a recent visit to Crozes-Hermitage in the northern Rhône. It has tremendous depth, a silky texture and that hard-to-define savoury, peppery, meaty quality that makes syrah from this part of the world so special.
Glaetzer-Dixon Family Vineyards Uberblanc Riesling, Tasmania, Australia 2014 (£19.95, Swig)
Mineral is a controversial tasting term, suggesting a scientifically untenable transfer of flavour from rock to wine. But it fits the mineral water-like, non-fruit character of this superbly incisive dry white, which also offers Aussie Riesling’s typical mix of white flowers and lime.
