Sweaty saddle, hints of ambergris, oodles of pippy hedgerow fruits. The way wine people waffle on about what they’re tasting can seem fanciful at best – and downright off-putting to anyone who’s not obsessed by the subject.
The ancient Egyptians enjoyed a tipple and recorded the fact in the tomb of the astronomer Nakht from about 1421BC.People have been talking and writing about wine for as long as they’ve been making it. Language is particularly important in the wine world because it’s pretty much the only way of sharing our impressions of taste and flavour with another person .
This gentlemanly tradition continued into the 20th century with writers such as the Australian doctor W. S. Benwell who, in the early 1960s, described the colour of a rosé as “brickish autumn russet, like the faded sail of a Venetian fishing-boat” – presupposing his equally gentlemanly readers would be thoroughly familiar with the references.The burgeoning middle-class interest in wine in the 1970s and ’80s gave rise to a new breed of wine writer: the popular critic.
But some people might say, at this point, a wine taster is just making stuff up. How can something produced from grapes smell like pepper or vanilla – not to mention well-hung venison and truffle?Describing a glass of riesling as “smelling like spring blossom” isn’t just waffle. Ah, yes, well this is where we wine people do stray into the realm of figurative language – metaphor, analogy and even, dare I say, poetry.
They don’t literally grip your tongue as you drink the wine – but using the word “grippy” is a good way of conveying the drying sensation of the astringency in the liquid.When we describe how the wine makes us feel when we drink it, we also resort to emotional qualifications such as satisfying or disappointing or bold, and tend to attach them to the wine rather than ourselves, making it appear to the casual reader that the wine possesses these attributes, not the taster.
But modern wine communicators are becoming more conscious of how this may be meaningless to someone else from a different cultural background. Wines with “minerality” are all the rage, in fact, and you come across this word a lot. It’s controversial, though: soil scientists grumpily point out that there is no direct relationship between the minerals in the ground and the flavour of wine grown in that ground.
Guinness once asked Brendan Behan to write them a slogan. He came up with 'Guinness makes you drunk.'
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