Fruit salad, sex and wine

Tim James does some primary research and looks quizzically at wine descriptions

Does it mean much to you when a wine is described as ‘savoury’? I hope so, as the word is used some 260 times in the 2004 edition of the Platter wine guide. I know, because I counted. Its imprecision (and maybe evocativeness) making it one of the commoner adjectives reached for by all the Platter tasters doing their damnedest to convey something of their sensual experiences, with only those slippery unwinelike things called words available.

Savoury was the description I first searched for after equipping myself with an electronic copy of Platter, because I had acted both as a taster and a proofreader for the Guide, and had become a trifle panicky while proofreading as the word seemed to jump out at me from my own tasting notes rather too often. Sure enough, my contribution of 45 instances proved embarrassingly excessive – fewer than Dave Hughes’, but he had tasted many more wines.

So I then set out to discover how much idiosyncrasies of taste influence wine descriptions. (Or are the idiosyncrasies ones of vocabulary rather than taste? Perhaps this is this pretty much the same thing, and we can only consciously taste what we know the words for?) Tasters are undeniably different, some constituted to find more bitterness or acidity, for example, than others, some trained to notice particular faults, such as the mousiness of brettanomyces. Are some tasters similarly predisposed (by language, experience, or the flow of their saliva or the number of taste-buds) to find more reminiscences of pear or cherry or meatiness than others?

Or more prunelle? There are six wines recorded in Platter that reminded Michael Fridjhon of prunelle – to my continuing confusion. I certainly do not doubt the association, but the description communicates nothing to me, clearly deprived of a useful experience. From dictionaries and the internet I have learnt that prunelle is either a sort of yellow plum or a brandy-based liqueur flavoured with sloes; but I am not closer to knowing what those wines are like.

Another referent that never appears above my initials is ‘bramble’ or ‘brambleberry’. Perhaps some of the wines I tasted positively reeked of the stuff, and I in my crude ignorance ignored it, or confounded the smell with that of some other berry – or evasively I just called the wines savoury. No doubt I’m wrong, and bramble should be part of the sensual repertoire of the South African reader of Platter, but to me ‘brambles’ vaguely suggests Enid Blyton’s Famous Five scratching their pale knees in the English countryside, while pursuing criminal, dark-complexioned men with bad accents. It is Dave Swingler who rambles furthest amid the Platter brambles. Nettles also have an inescapably English association for me, and convey little, despite being quite frequently invoked by the Platter tasters. I suspect that if one day I get to chew upon a nettle, or even smell one, it will remind me of some sauvignon blancs.

Fruits are, not unreasonably, a common resource for wine-tasters searching for the comparisons that often seem the only route to expression. While sharing obvious points of origin with wine, fruit also has the advantage of being pleasantly bucolic and natural in spirit, and somehow more luxurious and attractive than vegetables. When last was it suggest to you that a wine had whiffs of carrot, or overtones of spinach or Brussels sprouts? Perhaps none do, but perhaps we just never think of the comparison. Peas (tinned) occasionally serve for sauvignon blanc (in which connection we’d better not mention green pepper, as there seems only too good a reason to find it in some local examples). And asparagus is sexy enough to qualify: in Platter 2004 it is cited 20 times, with Tony Mossop invoking it more than anyone else – although, unlike others, he finds it most often in chardonnay, rather than sauvignon.

He offers, in fact, some of the more interesting idiosyncrasies. Christine Rud man wins hands-down with pear-drop, and Irina von Holdt with cherry, and Dave Hughes with chocolate and violets – all pretty standard stuff, but Tony triumphs with lemongrass and fennel (aka liquorice and anise). And he is the only taster to refine the common coffee or mocha, to find five instances of espresso.

Areas of experience

The eminent English winewriter Hugh Johnson does not like such descriptions: referring to wine commentators Oz Clarke and Jilly Goolden, he suggested that ‘when these people list all these flavours and aromas they think they have detected..., it appears to be a recipe for fruit salad’. There are other great areas of human experience, beyond salad-making, that can be drawn upon when describing wine. Johnson might be more at ease with one great standby of the older generation of British winewriters: class. Breed, pedigree, and straightforward classy are the relevant concepts here, and all of them (together with chic) are to be found in Platter, lurking among the fruit. The Platter editor (and we must remember his controlling influence) clearly does not encourage too much undemocratic analysis, however. Further to his credit, or that of his tasters, overt sexism is absent: the old stereotypes of ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ have no place here.

Psychology, yes. Who would have thought that it could be so inherent in winewriter babble? We do not have to turn too many Platter pages to find some analysis of wine psyche, from a cheerful pinotage to an inscrutable, sullen merlot, with any number of wines that are extrovert or reticent, stern or generous....

And if explicit sexism is absent, it does not mean that physicality is not to be found, sometimes almost luridly so – making one understand why wine is generally not thought suitable for children. There’s a ‘sensual, sexy little chenin’, for example, disporting itself not far from a muscular pinotage with ‘thrusting alcohol’, and a ‘luscious, well-endowed and fleshy’ chardonnay. Given our winemakers’ current penchant for overripe fruit and consequent high alcohols, the number of references to ‘burly’, ‘broad-shouldered’, ‘muscular’ and ‘powerful’ wines is perhaps unsurprising. The occasional ‘buxom’ cabernet and ‘gawky youth’ shiraz seem innocent in such company, and a ‘dainty’ pinot is positively old-fashioned.

XXX

Don’t, however, shoot us winewriters. We really are doing our best. And if we sometimes seem to be taking ourselves or our descriptions a little too seriously, well – laugh at us, and we will try again. It is certainly understandable that some winedrinkers are put off by prose that is too florid, fruity or fleshy (some might even be grateful for the semi-evasiveness of ‘savoury’). The younger generation – generation X – finds it all just too uncool, apparently. Take the American Wine X, a ‘young adult lifestyle magazine’ devoted to ‘Gen X culture’, which tries something rather different when rating wines to a modest maximum of three stars – Xs, rather. So a young gewürztraminer earns XX and the following description: ‘Well, tie me to the mast and flog me, sailor!’. A shiraz rosé (also XX) is ‘Better than lickin’ Cajun spices off a hot strawberry blond – zesty, spicy and mighty tasty.’

Perhaps not all the Wine X descriptions indicate obsession with rather abstract sexuality. And it may be a generational thing how arch, not to mention silly, inadequate and even dishonest, such descriptions seem. They are about words and fun, not about wine. Bring back the fruit salad recipes, the psychopathologies, the sensual explorations – at least they mark an honest attempt to communicate the indescribable, to grapple with the infinite variety of wine and the elusiveness of language and to make a connection between the two, however brief and tenuous.