Oenonism
Comments: 2
… or How to Tell if Your Cherry is Corrupt.
Fascinating article on the language of wine writing which, let’s face it, can get pretty stupid at times. Via dangerousmeta.
Wet Dogs and Gushing Oranges: Winespeak for a New Millennium
Sean Shesgreen, The Chronicle of Higher EducationClearly, unlike literary critics and art historians, wine critics have failed to invent a dialect of their own to describe precisely what they do. Wine writers are loosely organized into two adversarial camps, researchers and marketers. The first, located in winery labs or universities, is committed to pruning oenoleptic diction back to a limited number of exact, scientific terms, but that camp is too obscure to achieve its goals. The second camp, operating in glossy magazines, prestigious daily papers, and $50-a-year newsletters, is committed to the hard sell, by expanding the language of wine through imagination and expressiveness. Devoted to the “poetry” of the grape, these wine “rappers” resemble nomads who wander from one landscape to another, gleaning their next crop of terms to mythologize their next vintage. As their search leads them farther and farther afield, it yields literary harvests that are increasingly fantastic and improbable.
If current writing is the barometer of the next oenological wave, chronicles of wines as “hedonistic,” “pretty and caressing,” “ravishing,” “pillowy,” “seductive,” and “overendowed” point to the erotic, affirming the view that, in the kaleidoscope of Americans’ fixations, gastronomy has eclipsed sex.
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Posted to General Rants • 2003.03.09 (Sun) • 11:19
Comments
Posted by Robb S. 2003.03.09, 17:15
Althought he can certainly turn a phrase, I thought the author’s arguments were overblown and contrived. Just because wine writers are more likely to compare wine flavors to berries and cherries rather than brussels sprouts and garlic, he sees some vast conspiracy to produce a new “pastoral literature” of “imaginary, and nonsensical images of country life for the amusement of city dwellers.” Personally I think comparing wine flavors and aromas to those of foods is as sensible and as accessible to normal readers as any other convention, and wines really do taste more like cherries than like garlic.
His points about gender and class analogies in wine writing were interesting, other than the fact that it all happened FIFTY YEARS AGO. He claims to be a former wine columnist, so I was interested to see what his own writing was like, but unfortunately there’s absolutely no evidence of it via Google.
He reminds me of Tom Wolfe writing about modern architecture - clever, witty, and totally missing the point.
Posted by jh 2003.03.25, 23:46
Robb —-
Good points, to which I did mean to respond in a timely and semi-intelligent fashion. Then I got distracted. Can I blame the vagaries of spring? I thought not.
Did you see the “Recent Wines” post by Dean Allen on Textism?
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