Is writing about wine difficult? A response to an academic linguist who doesn’t care much for wine writers
Linguist Dariusz Galasiński has recently begun turning his considerable academic prowess to the subject of words and wine. He’s currently writing a book on the subject, and in a recent piece published on WineMag in South Africa, he raises some points that deserve further discussion. For me, there are two different sides to wine writing. There’s writing more generally about wine – the bulk of wine writing – where we visit wine regions, chat with producers, taste through their ranges, walk through the vineyards, and then write about the experience. Nothing unusually challenging about this. Of course, it’s hard to write well about any topic, but to say that good writing is hard to do says nothing useful. Then there’s the second issue: actually describing the wine you taste in words. This, I would argue, is very difficult. Finding the right words to describe a perceptual event in the flavour space is challenging for everyone, not just wine writers. Dariusz, though, seems to lump both of these activities together, and this is where the problems start with this piece.
‘Is language not enough; is wine really difficult to write about?’ he asks. ‘The key argument underpinning stories of wine writers’ difficulties is this: wine is so complex and so nuanced that rendering it in language is nigh impossible. It takes tremendous skill to discern wine complexity and so, it escapes language.’
Immediately we run into trouble. Who is saying that wine escapes language ‘because it takes tremendous skill to discern wine complexity’? Discerning wine complexity doesn’t take tremendous skill. Most drinkers can perceive this complexity. That’s not what we are talking about. And who is suggesting rendering wine in language is nigh impossible because wine is ‘so complex and nuanced’? Precisely no one. Some wines are simple, some wines are complex. Putting the perception of both into words is challenging because of that perilous journey from perception to language. It’s not because wine is special. Beer experts and whisky experts have the same challenge.
‘If Kant, Hume and Wittgenstein rendered their ideas, if Baudelaire, Saramago and Wisłocka were able to write about humanity in some of the most beautiful texts in history, wine writers can describe fermented grape juice. In fact, they manage it so well that most of them decide to replace their linguistic finesse with a score. All the amazing complexity seems to be given justice with a simple 94.’
This is false equivalence, and a non-sequitur. If we say that writing about wine is difficult, what we are talking about is the challenge of taking that perceptive event – when we experience the flavour of wine – and turning it into words. This is a specific challenge not faced by the famous philosophers, and bringing them into the discussion doesn’t add anything useful. The non-sequitur is suggesting that writers manage this task so well they turn it into a score. This strikes me of lazy, off-the-hip writing. The score is an attempt to rate the wine in terms of quality, just as a teacher might score a pupil’s essay. But scoring an essay isn’t the same task for a teacher as writing a precis of the contents of the essay. Describing a wine in words and giving a score are different things, and the latter isn’t a shorthand of the former, and doesn’t indicate that the person rating things that describing the wine is easy.
‘That said, there is evidence that aroma lexis can be inconsistent and limited. Does it mean that language is inadequate? No, it just means that modern European societies do not rely on scent much (no, wine is not an issue here), so we have not needed an elaborate vocabulary. Moreover, we found ways to cope. We use other senses to describe smell and get around the problem by simply saying ‘it smells like….’. Both tactics work surprisingly well.’
This is the crux of the issue. We perceive wine as a whole: a sensation that is put together in our brains by taking the input from taste, smell, touch and sight and doing some computational work before we are aware of the flavour. And then we try to communicate this flavour perception using words, and this is undeniably hard. I remember the first time I tried to write a tasting note: the result was a few words, barely a sentence. In order to describe wine, I had to learn a lexicon – a set of terms commonly used to describe the tastes and smells and sensations created by the wine. Then I had to learn how to apply this vocabulary to wine. This takes some training, because it is very difficult. And there are different ways of describing wines. We can use descriptors, finding elements in the wine that we can describe using similarity of the impression to well-known fruits, spices and aromas. We can use wholistic descriptors, often using metaphor and simile or metonymy (figurative language). Or we can liken the wine to others we have experienced. But most tasting notes fail to evoke anything close to the impression of the wine on another simply because this is a very hard task. By claiming this is a hard task, it’s a bizarre take to the jump to accusations that I’m claiming I’m special or great. It’s an admission that this is something that is hard to do, and I’m just trying my best.
I’d argue that our lexicon for flavour is inadequate, which is why we have to make it up. And this is a task recognized in the literature as being challenging. One of the issues that bedevils attempts to capture smells and flavours in words is the difficulty we have naming them. We experience the sensation, but it seems incredibly difficult to put it into words. We even find it difficult to name familiar smells. In normally functioning people, experiments have shown that only about 20-50% of common odours are successfully named, whereas the hit rate for common pictures is close to 100%. People can clearly tell the differences between these smells; they just can’t match them with the right word.
Researcher Asifa Majid has studied two groups of hunter-gatherers: the Jahai people of Malaysia and the Maniq of Thailand. These two groups have a much larger vocabulary for smell words than we do in the west, and they also have direct words for the smell experience, rather than using, as we do, mainly references (it smells like…). She tested 10 Jihai against 10 native American English speakers and found that the Jihai were as consistent in naming odours as they were colours, and they were more consistent than the English speakers. The English speakers used source-based descriptions rather than the abstract, basic smell terms that the Jihai favored. These basic terms are not from a single source but related to a broad class of objects, and this is something we lack to a degree in English, claim the authors. ‘For the Jihai, a cultural preoccupation with odors aligns with a high codability of smells in language,’ says Majid. Together with a colleague, Ewelina Wnuk, Majid has drawn up a list of 15 of these abstract basic smell words that the Maniq, a group of Thai hunter gatherers, use to describe odours. In their environment – rainforest – the sense of smell is an important one. They are surrounded by smells all the time, and these are useful environmental cues. So it would make sense for them to have an expanded language, and a greater ability to verbalise the smells they perceive.
‘I would despair if I had to write another story on Rioja, Bordeaux or Napa. All has been said, all wine has been tasted. Your eyes must bleed as you write again about the clouds in Barolo or the sun on the grand-cru slopes of Burgundy. Well, take a few books about wine regions and you will see that it is one book written hundreds of times. Delete the names and you will not know what you are reading.’
So, a casual dismissal of all wine writing. Is some wine writing bad? Yes. Is some wine writing repetitive? Yes. Has everything that needs to be said about famous wine regions been said? No. These are large, complex regions and the point being missed here is that there is continual change in the wine world, with the most basic change being vintage variation, and the most interesting change the renewal that comes from new producers emerging and generational change, bringing fresh interpretations and directions even in the most well known regions. Of course, the endless broad-brush 1800 word features covering entire regions fail to capture this level of interesting detail, but to dismiss all wine writing like this is bizarre.
‘There is a side-narrative to the wine-as-extraordinary adage: the story of the amazing wine writer. He or she is so amazingly knowledgeable (this is a quote) that dumbing the message down and trying to communicate with the average wine drinker like me is a task all too often impossible to complete. The reader is simply incapable of bridging the gap between their ignorance and the wine writer’s greatness. Basically, it is a nifty way to avoid saying: I have nothing interesting to say.’
I don’t know many wine writers who consider themselves to be amazing, and I can’t think of any who would actually say that it’s too hard to simplify wine to communicate with the average communicator, if that average communicator wants to learn about wine. What some journalists might say, and this is an important difference, is that normal consumers simply haven’t got any interest in reading about wine. And that’s true. They might want to taste wine, if they are offered it, but writing about wine is really abstract: we are using words to describe flavour. I can’t imaging many people who eat steak eager to read about the flavour of steak, but they might want to know where to find the best steak. There’s an important difference here. The reason trying to communicate with the average wine drinker might be important is because the average wine drinker isn’t interested in reading about wine. It’s also about knowing your audience. There’s no point in me prattling on about the fact that the Beaujolais crus have historically been associated with different styles of Beaujolais, but when you dig deeper there’s quite a bit of variation in the soils within each cru, unless the people I’m speaking too are really interested in Beaujolais. That’s not criticizing the average wine drinker.
Dariusz is smart, has five advanced academic degrees and large vocabularies in two languages. But while the message he has about language and wine is one we are eager to listen about, this sort of article isn’t what we were waiting for. He’s not displaying his usual academic rigour here. And he doesn’t seem to like wine writers all that much.
