JUST WILLIAMS
No schist, Sherlock Language evolves all the time, and phrases that once struck a chord can quickly become dated or even offensive. It’s no different in the world of wine. So which tasting descriptions should we jettison, and which ones should we keep, even if they might annoy the pedants and purists?
T
he animal rights lobby group PETA has a way of making
enemies out of potential friends.
Generally speaking, it’s the group’s shock tactics – dressing up models in blood-
spattered furs, inflammatory straplines
about “grabbing pussies” etc – that make some wonder if PETA isn’t an agent
provocateur formed by the meat industry to turn as many people as possible away from veganism.
But its latest campaign invited ridicule
rather than disgust. Arguing that certain English phrases cement and perpetuate
animal cruelty in a way that we wouldn’t accept with racist or sexist language, the
group proposed a list of alternative idioms to help us eliminate “speciesism”. We
should bring home the bagels rather than
the bacon, PETA suggested, take the flower by the thorns rather than the bull by the
horns, and, most cringeworthy of all, feed two birds with one scone.
Daft as these suggestions may have been,
it did get me thinking about the way we
use language to talk about wine. As PETA (uncontroversially) says, “words matter … as our understanding of social justice evolves, our language evolves with it”.
And there are wine-words that make me wince every bit as much as PETA’s scone does. Not all of them are offensive in a
moral sense; many are simply aesthetically outrageous. Other phrases are annoying
to others, but in my totally arbitrary and subjective opinion, worth defending. So,
having appointed myself for the purposes of this column Wine-Language Czar with the power to censor tasting notes as and
when I see fit, which terms would I banish,
wine with lots of tannins and alcohol
versus a pretty light floral and delicate
style. But most of us also know that the implications of this metaphor are, how to put this, a little passé. When even
the silk-scarfed old roué in the export
department at your Champagne supplier
has stopped describing his blanc de blancs as a “temperamental mademoiselle”, it’s
probably worth conceding that this way of
describing wine – which also takes in such titillating terms as buxom and voluptuous
– is best consigned to the same fetid corner of Room 101 as Miss World contests and Confessions of a Window Cleaner. Breeding
and which would I grant a permit to
In a world in which Jacob Rees-Mogg is
Masculine and feminine
people among us who can, in all sincerity,
continue?
We all know what these two descriptors
mean in the wine context: a big powerful
In a world in which Jacob Rees-Mogg is taken seriously, I shouldn’t be surprised that people use the phrase ‘of good breeding’ as a statement of praise THE WINE MERCHANT January 2019 18
apparently taken seriously, I probably
shouldn’t be surprised that there are still use the phrase “of good breeding” as a statement of praise. That it still crops
up, along with “nobility”, “aristocratic”
and “class” in tasting notes that, in one of my other day jobs, I have to edit,
may seem amusingly dated rather than
dangerous – but it’s not confined to the
older generation. In any case, and however
casually it’s used, should we really be using something as blameless as a tasting note