Free Association Wine Notes

The Symposium for Professional Wine Writers, held every year for the last four at the Meadowood resort in the heart of the Napa Valley, brings writers, editors and other wine professionals from across the country (and this year, in one case, from across the Atlantic) together for three days of seminars, discussions and wretched excess. Topics come and go, but there is always one session devoted to writing tasting notes—starting, of course, with some tasting.

I used to think that the most irritating kind of wine tasting note is the endless, show-off list of descriptors, most of which have little to do with the actual enjoyment of the wine. Now, after this year’s tasting and scribbling session, I have a new pet peeve: notes that purport to describe wines by invoking utterly unrelated, non-wine experiences. 

Note writing is inherently difficult. This year, the bottles on hand were three anonymous, brown-bagged reds which could safely be assumed to be from the Napa Valley (since the Symposium is an all-Napa, all-the-time event). Double-blind tasting—where you not only don’t know what the wine is, but not even what type of wine it is—has its own perils; the inability of the session leaders to correctly identify three straight Syrahs is nicely recounted in Jim Gordon’s Unreserved blog at the Wine Enthusiast Online.

But even if you know exactly what you’re tasting, communicating that experience to someone else is frustratingly hard. In part, this is because wine characteristics are so elusive, evanescent; one minute you smell raspberries, the next minute cocoa. The deeper problem is communicating a sensory experience—aromatic, organoleptic, tactile—in words, which come from and get processed by a whole other part of the brain. Which means that all wine descriptions—except for chemical formulas and spectrometer readouts—are analogies, at least one step removed from the sensory experience.

This is true even of fruit terms and other aroma/flavor descriptors that seem quite concrete. As Karen MacNeil pointed out in my tasting session, writing that a particular Sauvignon Blanc smells like green bell pepper is not like claiming a bell pepper smells like a bell pepper; the observation translates into, “This wine gives off an aroma like the one you would expect when sniffing a bell pepper.” Without giving someone the wine, you can’t give the exact experience, only an analogy, hopefully one close to the mark.

My objection to notes that go on and on about fruit descriptors is not that they are inexact, but that they are largely irrelevant to my enjoyment of a particular bottle of wine, or to my decision to purchase the wine under review. Would the presence or absence of the descriptor “cassis” in a Cabernet Sauvignon note make me more or less likely to stock up? No; but comments on the wine’s balance, or its acidity, or the harshness of its tannins might.

Full disclosure: I am not the world’s most discriminating fruit-descriptor-finder. Maybe it’s the 20 years of chain-smoking unfiltered Lucky Strikes, or maybe it’s just lack of verbal facility. Whatever; if you’re looking for a taster who can always nail that note of kaffir lime peel in a Roussanne, I’m not your guy.

If listing descriptors has only limited usefulness, what happens when the tasting notes don’t try to describe the wine at all, but rather something else entirely, another whole realm of experience? You know the kind of note I have in mind: “Like running into your first boy/girlfriend at a high school reunion: fond memories of that first time, but the nagging question, ‘what in the world was I thinking?’” It’s not hard to find notes like this, especially in the web-o-sphere. I credit Wine X magazine with starting the trend a decade ago in the form of tasting notes built around movie analogies—“Like Tracy and Hepburn in ‘Adam’s Rib’: plenty of . . . and even more . . . .” My theory goes on to speculate that these notes did a great deal for NetFlix and help explain the magazine’s demise.

The best practitioners of this form are terrific writers, able to condense a complex glass of wine into a compelling metaphor. Way more fun to read than the dry, dusty, old-style notes that methodically march through color, aroma and flavor categories, a clinical dissection that gives no clue about whether rational people would ever want to put this wine in their mouths. But what exactly do they communicate?

Several examples in this vein that were read aloud at my Symposium session were greeted warmly, and many people, including me, seemed to be nodding and saying to themselves, “Yeah, the wine is kind of like that.’ The problem is, the roundabout connection between the personal experience and the wine only makes sense if you have the wine in front of you—in which case you don’t need anybody else’s tasting notes. If you haven’t tasted the wine, you’re still in the dark; you know what mood it put the writer in, but little about what the wine would do for you. You might not even know whether it’s red or white; the boyfriend/girlfriend thing works wither way.

Maybe it’s just my rampant antiquity, but the nouveau style in wine notes leaves me thirsting for . . . less. Can someone explain to me how they’re supposed to work?