Here in the wine corner, we spend our days trying put words to what we sell. It’s not unpleasant work, but it is often challenging. All wine can be (and is, by the way) analyzed in someone’s lab to determine its exact composition, but even if we were privy to the numbers, it would scarcely help in communicating what it’s like to take a given wine into our mouths, slosh it around a bit and then send it on its way. You want to know; we want to tell you. This is the work.
I’ve long since given up on the idea that the best way to talk about wine is via some painfully tedious cataloging of each scent and taste that can be discovered in it — elements which are reminiscent of other things that are not wine at all.
An eccentric but strangely canny Brit I met long ago liked to refer to this as the ‘fruits and veg’ school of wine tasting. It’s not exactly useless to note that your glass of Merlot is reminiscent of ripe plums, but the observation is about as helpful as describing your new love interest as a brunette. Plenty of plummy Merlot and brunettes in the world, you see. What may make this one unique, or at least distinctive, is what we long to know.
It may be that your brunette is charming, genial and outgoing; or perhaps cerebral, self-contained and somewhat intense. Rational? Romantic? Reserved? Rakish? To my mind, any and all of these terms do a much better job of communicating just what sort of person it is to whom you’ve made a gift of your heart than hair color ever could.
Were you to eavesdrop on a wine tasting in the low, narrow, submarine-like confines of the FKC wine cellar, you might overhear us ransacking the language for ways to put a name to what we taste. Does it further one’s understanding to describe a wine as earnest, petulant, sweet-tempered, mendacious, flamboyant, futuristic, tentative, wistful, gregarious, columnar, scintillating, corporatist, a chancer? We think so.
You might well ask why with everything else we have to do we are so busy burglarizing the language. That’s easy. It’s because that’s where they keep the words.