The Economist explains
WHEN it comes to describing wine, few people take issue with "fruity", "acidic" or "ruby". Most can handle "blackcurrant", "chocolate", "tobacco", "truffle" or even "toast" (this Johnson swears to having caught a whiff of all five). But then self-styled connoisseurs begin spouting attributes like "graphite" (which does not smell or—if nibbling pencil ends is any guide—taste of anything), "zesty mineral" (how it differs from plain mineral is anyone's guess), "angular" (huh?), or "dumb" (indeed). Little wonder oenological jargon gets a bad rap. And oenophiles (your correspondent among them) stand accused of bamboozling the uninitiated, probably out of some underhanded motive.
In an essay published a few years ago in Journal of Wine Economics under the title "On Wine Bullshit", Richard Quandt, an economist at Princeton University, puts it thus:
In some instances, there is an unhappy marriage between a subject that especially lends itself to bullshit and bullshit artists who are impelled to comment on it. I fear that wine is one of those instances where this unholy union is in effect.
Indeed. But does vinous verbiage serve any purpose other than to bemuse run-of-the-mill wine drinkers? In a recent article in Slate, Coco Krumme, a wine economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, suggests—tongue in cheek—that the answer may be "yes":
Since it sometimes seems as though wine tasting is a fixed game of bluffs (let my gravel pass, and I won't challenge your carob), I began to wonder if wine descriptors might not be correlated with something other than flavour: price.
To test the hypothesis, she looked at online reviews of over 3,000 bottles priced $5-200 and found that a wine's price can be predicted on the basis of what terms, and combinations of terms, feature in the description (she used a method called a Bayesian classifier, employed in many spam filters to assign a legitimacy rating to messages depending on the words that make it up).
The analysis revealed, first off, that "cheap" and "expensive" words are used differently. Cheap words are more likely to be recycled, while words correlated with expensive wines tend to be in the tail of the distribution. That is, reviewers are more likely to create new vocabulary for top-end wines [...] Of course that doesn't explain why boysenberry, for instance, sounds expensive to wine critics, while refreshing sounds cheap. My guess is that, when it comes to invoking elegance, foreign and complex words have a natural advantage. Cigars and truffle conjure up prestige and luxury. Meanwhile, a little-known berry or spice conveys the worldly sophistication of the critic, which the drinker can share. For a price.
In an earnest effort to nix subjectivity from reviews, critics have gone too far, leaving us with a bag of adjectives that say a lot about price, and almost nothing about flavour.
This does not, of course, mean that the entire repertory of wine terms deserves to be consigned to the spittoon. As Ms Krumme admits, however hesitantly, expensive wines may actually carry some olfactory notes cheaper plonk lacks (hence the "almost" in the final sentence above). More importantly, though, consuming wine is often about more than just physical pleasure. It is also a game. There is no denying the intense satisfaction derived from a sense that one has put a finger on what it is that makes a bottle taste great. Like many intellectual pastimes, this one, too, relies on playing with words. Just stay off the silly tropes.