Translating Wine Talk

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“This is gorgeous, with lush linzer torte, boysenberry pâte de fruit and plum sauce notes that captivate, while anise, Lapsang souchong tea and singed apple wood notes fill in the background. The long finish is fleshy and driven. Best through 2030.”

That’s an actual, honest-to-goodness,published wine review by one of Wine Specator’s critics. If you read it and thought that you’d have no idea what wine he was talking about (it’s a Châteauneuf-du-Pape red, by the way), even if it came right up and kicked you in the head, well, you’re not alone. Some of us have been tasting thousands of wine a year - for several years - and we don’t know what he’s talking about with this description.

The point here isn’t to pick on Wine Spectator (okay, maybe just a little), but to point out that “winespeak” is inherently difficult to follow, but, as you’ll learn in a few minutes, it is somewhat essential when it comes to discussing wine. Not enjoying it, mind you, but discussing it. Seriously, it’s just way easier once you give in and accept some portion of the madness.

As humans, we lack a vocabulary to match wine’s aromatic and gustatory complexity. Wine rarely smells and tastes of only one thing, and that complexity is exactly why it’s so beloved as the world’s greatest adult beverage. As a result, we can only ever talk about wine in the abstract, since everything else it smells and takes like came first, from the standpoint of our brains, anyway. Look at it this way: you'd never sniff an orange blossom and exclaim “Moscato!” or taste a lime and yell “Finger Lakes Riesling!” It’s always the other way around. This is impart due to the fact that our brains aren’t quite equipped to properly grasp all of the complexity that wine offers. It’s also due to the fact that when we smell, there is information being exchanged directly between our olfactory system and the portions of our brain that are partially responsible for memory and emotion, and it all happens nearly instantly before our conscious brain gets involved in the information “transaction” when we’re tasting a wine.

Presumably, this subjective fuzziness when it comes to our brains “interpreting” each wine that we taste gives us some license to challenge one another on the number of specific, obscure descriptors that we can identify when tasting a wine. Not all of us experience the same wine in exactly the same way, and not all of us have ever had that “Lapsang souchong tea” that Wine Spectator was so fond of in the above review. Which often means that in trying to convey how a wine manifests itself, we wine critics run the risk of disenfranchising consumers instead. Read that Wine Spectator review again. How many of us have ever singed apple wood? It doesn’t help that we also have to employ terms such as “mouthfeel,” which are off-putting to new wine lovers but have to be used (because otherwise we’d write things like “the general sensation of a wine in your mouth based on its chemically interactive properties” which are actually worse).

It’s often best to avoid highly detailed wine notes (and fortunately the proliferation of alternative wine media, such as wine blogs, has started swinging the pendulum back to higher-level descriptions), but it’s impossible to avoid “winespeak” altogether when you’re learning about wine. Here are a few such terms that you’ll almost certainly encounter when talking or reading about wine, and a short translation of each to help you on your way.

Nose

Simply put, this is how a wine smells to us, and it’s often used interchangeably with “aroma” and “bouquet.” We don’t use “smell” because a wine, technically, can - and usually does - have multiple smells. The intensity of those aromas, and how well they interact together or appear to us separately, are all part and parcel of a wine’s overall experience.

Body

This is shorthand for how heavy or light a wine feels in your mouth. Think about the difference between lighter and heavier cheeses and how they feel on your tongue, and you’ll quickly get the idea. Generally, a wine with more alcohol will present itself as having more body, while a wine higher in refreshing acidity (and/or lower in alcohol) will often present itself with a lighter feel in your mouth.

Structure

In order to feel complete, and in order to age gracefully over time in the bottle, a wine needs something (chemically) holding its flavors and aromas together. These usually come in the form of by-products of the winemaking process, including citric-like acids, and mouth-puckering tannins (which are natural preservatives that are extracted from grape skins, seeds and stems). High acidity can make a wine as bracing as battery acid in its youth, but might help it stabilize and last a good long while (even many years) in the bottle (German Rieslings are famous for this). Tannins are more prevalent in red wines, since they see more skin contact during winemaking than whites, and can make the inside of your mouth feel dry. Tannins provide “scaffolding” for red wines in terms of aging, and can be harsh in their youth. Tannins usually soften over time, making a wine feel softer and more elegant after bottle aging (if you’re impatient, you can serve highly-structured reds with foods that interact with tannins, such as cheese or meat, to soften their impression in your mouth).

Finish

After you swallow (or spit, in the case of us tasters, wine competition judges, and critics), a wine’s flavors and aromas will stick around in your nasal passages and throat (we experience these “retro-nasally”). How long they stick around, how good the elements are, and how intense that all feels when they do hang around, is all part of what is known as a wine’s finish. Generally, good-to-great wines have a complex assortment of aromas and flavors that stick around longer in the finish, and are intense without being overbearing, all prolonging the pleasure and adding to wine’s enjoyment.

Cheers!

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