Talking about wine talk
Back when John F. Kennedy was President, Helen Thomas, the White House correspondent and, at the time, the only woman to hold that post, asked JFK what he was doing to help women.
“Not enough, I’m sure,” smiled Kennedy, in his wry, bemused way. The implication was that, of course, no American President can ever do enough when it comes to the great issues, like women’s rights. All he or she can do is to try and make things better.
I thought of that long-ago incident when I read The New Yorker’s latest article on wine, called “Is there a better way to talk about wine?”
My answer? Borrowing from JFK, I’m sure there is a better way to talk about wine. I’m just not sure that I, or anybody else, knows quite what it is, or how to get there.
The New Yorker article breaks no new ground for readers of my blog, who are thoroughly familiar with these complaints about “extravagant tasting notes” that ooze “overwrought and unreliable…flowery, elaborate flavor descriptions” aimed at “wealthy men.” Familiar, too, are my readers with the various forms of experimental subterfuge of recent years, wherein studies report on how wine consumers, even educated ones, can be bamboozled if the wines are tasted blind, or if the labels are switched, or if information about them is deliberately distorted. The New Yorker article refers to these studies to bolster its case, and then reiterates that overblown wine vocabularies contribute to the “confusion” experienced by so many consumers. (You can almost hear the writer, Bianca Bosker’s, joy as she quotes a Wine Advocate descriptor: “liquefied Viagra.”)
It is of course easy as falling off a log to criticize anything in the world, as long as the person doing the criticizing doesn’t have the responsibility for coming up with something better. Bosker’s deconstruction of “minerality,” and the near impossibility of defining it, testifies to this fact: Just because something is hard doesn’t make it silly. She toys with the alternative of a “chemistry”-based descriptive vocabulary (fat chance) rather than an “obfuscating” one of poetry and metaphor. She even turns to Matt Kramer’s new book, True Taste, but completely misses Matt’s point: he’s not saying (as Ms. Bosker writes) that “only six [sic] words [actually seven] are necessary to evaluate a bottle’s essential attributes.” Matt himself writes that his book “is not, of course, about a mere seven words. Instead, it’s about those values that involve actual judgment,” and “is about tasting wine with discernment.”
Well, who could be against judgment and discernment? Matt, who has made a living of being a wine wordsmith (same as the rest of us), was looking for a new angle for a new book, and came up with True Taste: it’s a little frothy, but no harm, no foul, and plenty to think about. There’s nothing wrong with talking about “insight, harmony, texture, layers, finesse, surprise and nuance”—Matt’s seven words. But am I wrong in thinking that those concepts, if not explicitly spelled out then at least broadly described, have underlain good wine writing forever? They certainly lubricate the writing I know, from my own books and articles to Parker’s, Oz Clarke’s, Jancis Robinson’s, Steve Tanzer’s, Antonio Galloni’s, Benjamin Lewin’s, yes and Matt Kramer’s, and so on. If writers want to add things about raspberries and peppercorns, so much the better. I think Matt, who enjoys an adroit pen (can we say that anymore?), would be the last to condemn metaphorical wine descriptors. His grudge—mine, too—is when they go over the top.
But where is the line? Nobody really knows, and this is where Ms. Bosker’s article is so frustrating, in the way these “on-the-one-hand, on-the-other” New Yorker articles can be. The title seems to imply that, if the reader will just wade through the 2,098 words of text, he or she will be enlightened, and discover that there truly is “a better way to talk about wine.”
Alas, nothing of the sort happens. And, if you think about recent attempts to make wine writing “better,”–I’m talking to you, Twitter, and to a big part of the blogosphere—you’ll have to admit that failure is no success at all.
But perhaps I am too harsh on Ms. Bosker, for at the very end, she seems to change tone and switch over to a belief that “a little mystery” in winespeak is not such a bad thing. She even wonders “what a Baryshnikov in a glass might taste like.” Now, that’s good wine writing—and a good way to think about wine–but it’s also exactly the kind of “overwrought, flowery” metaphor that critics, including Ms. Bosker, came out swinging against. Happily, by the end of her article, Ms. Bosker apparently has undergone an intellectual metamorphosis in which she realizes that her initial concept was, if not erroneous, at least hopelessly incomplete to describe the challenge of talking about wine. As a writer myself, I’m familiar with that evolution: Writing makes you think, makes you analyze simplistic thoughts so that you realize they’re not as simple as they might have seemed at first blush. You end up, in other words, in a different–and better–place from where you started. This is a very good thing.
So is there a better way to talk about wine? I suppose there is, although I don’t think the best wine writing, from any era, including ours, needs improvement. But I welcome this chit-chat, if for no other reason than that it stimulates this sort of discussion.
A timeless rumination on the subject . . .
From Slate
(posted June 15, 2007):
“Cherries, Berries, Asphalt, and Jam.
Why wine writers talk that way.”
Link: http://www.slate.com/articles/life/drink/2007/06/cherries_berries_asphalt_and_jam.html
By Mike Steinberger
“Drink: Wine, beer, and other potent potables” Column
I await Kyle’s updating of this “thought piece”:
“Matt Kramer got it wrong about bullies who put down wine”
Link: http://www.coloradowinepress.com/2014/10/matt-kramer-got-it-wrong-about-bullies.html#more
For those who are intrigued by Adam Gopnik’s tout of Stephen Potter’s “Winemanship” section of his “Lifemanship” books, let me proffer a link to an excerpt:
http://www.heretical.com/potter/winesman.html
And to bring the circle complete, here is a link to Adam Gopnik’s The New Yorker (September 6, 2004 issue) article:
“Through a Glass Darkly;
What do we talk about when we talk about wine?”
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2004/09/06/through-a-glass-darkly-4
Excerpt:
“Well, what does make wine taste bad or good? Is there really a standard, or a way to agree on one? Within the heart of every wine drinker, there is the suspicion that no one really knows. . . .
“. . . Rachel Herz, a professor of psychology at Brown, conducts research into the effects of ‘frames’ on the perception of smells. (Wine tasters are ‘noses’ first of all.) Smells, she reports, ‘are so malleable when it comes to verbal context that when reasonable verbal information is available it will override and even replace the olfactory information.’
The effect is pronounced when the smells are, in some way, ambiguous . . .
“To make things worse, the nose turns out to have the shortest memory of all the senses. . . . What the nose knows, in effect, is not much, and that soon forgotten. (Wine lovers protest violently when they are told this, but their protest, from the academic point of view, is a bit like the protest of eyewitnesses who are sure they saw what they say they saw.)
“Yet to accept this is not to say that the elaborate language of wine evaluation is necessarily phony. It is exactly because smells are so labile and hard to grasp that they need more help from words than other sensations. . . .
“The real question is not whether wine snobs and wine writers are big phonies but whether they are any bigger phonies than, say, book reviewers or art critics. For with those things, too, context effects are overwhelming. All description is impressionistic, and all impressions are interpretive. Colors and shapes don’t emerge from pictures in neat, particulate packages to strike the eye, either, any more than plots and themes come direct to the mind from the pages of books. Everything is framed by something.
“Anyway, no elaborate rhetoric of compliments is meant to be ‘accurate’; it is meant to be complimentary. . . .”
Good writing of any type is enjoyable to read.
Bad writing, not so much.
But good prose or not, wine writing is a literary style, not an recommendation system and should not be viewed as such.