Eccentric Flower:199905/a language for comparison
From Eccentric Flower
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may first a language for comparison All right. Having gotten today's random thoughts all swept out (in the previous postcard, which precedes this one by ten minutes), I can concentrate on the idea that I've wanted to set down here ever since coming back from San Francisco. But first, some necessary preamble. In the course of five-plus years around the lovely Deborah (greatest of the Judges, as you know), I find - to my great surprise - that some of her oenophilia has rubbed off on me. In English, that means: I seem to have accumulated a lot of information about wine. I have learned enough to ask for and obtain the things I like - and if that doesn't seem like an impressive trick, consider that I still can't manage to do that with a haircut. I can read wine labels. I may know more about German wines than she does (being able to read German helps a lot there, though). And although I'm not sophisticated enough to care very much, I can tell a bad wine from an okay wine, a good wine from a great one - not that I've ever drunk any of the great ones; I can't afford them and you probably can't either. This is all new. My mother never drinks wine except for an occasional glass at parties. Her taste in alcohol runs to things like margaritas and pina coladas; most of the other women in the family are the same; the men drink beer. Certainly we never had wine with meals ... unlike Nonelvis' family, where it was a fairly normal occurrence. But I digress. Among the things I have learned is that the "language of wine" is not just snobbery. It actually has uses. When you hear someone describing a wine as "smoky" or "flinty" or "tannic" or "rough" or whatever, sure, it's possible they're being pretentious, but they may just be struggling to quantify something very complex. The process of winemaking results in a liquid containing hundreds of esters - the chemicals responsible for flavors and aromas - and as a result wine is a synthesis of many, many tastes. Ironically enough, the one thing wine usually doesn't taste like is grapes! Grapes that leave a definite grape taste are good jelly grapes or eating grapes, but bad wine grapes. There are lots of wine terms for flavor, but let's simplify things a little. Let's pick a few characteristics that we'll use as placeholders for entire categories of tastes. That will allow us to get down to seven basics: Acidic. Acid here doesn't mean vinegar; a vinegary taste would probably mean the wine had spoiled. Acid in wines is more akin to lemon juice. Often you can't taste it directly, but you can feel the lip-puckering sensation. Fruity. Wine grapes may not taste like grapes, but they're capable of mimicking a lot of other fruits - a wine can contain tastes of apples, pears, and other fruits. Sweet. Some wines are just plain sweet, with a honeylike flavor, and it's usually pretty easy to detect when it's there. Spicy. Some wines taste like they've had pepper or nutmeg added to them - a slightly burning spiciness that is unrelated to the alcohol burn. Fatty. Okay, a wine can't really be fatty - but it can contain buttery tastes, and the smoothness that usually comes with a fatty food. "Nutty" flavors - wines can taste of pecans and other nuts - also fall in this category, since the taste that gives a nut its flavor is essentially an oily, fatty one. A "meaty" flavor is a combination of fattiness and other things. Tannic. A lot of American winemakers make their wines too tannic. Part of this is because of what they think Americans will buy (Americans are notoriously conservative wine drinkers, but that's a rant for another day) and partly because they rush their wines to market too quickly and consumers don't know to age their wines - tannins disappear as the wines age. Tannin is the sensation that makes the roof of your mouth feel dry after a cup of hot black tea - tea contains a great deal of it. The final bitterness of a sip of wine, and the dry sensation described, is due to tannins. Tannins come partially from the grapes and partially from barrels, for wines aged in wood - a tannic wine is sometimes called "oaky" for that reason. Rough. Some people use "rough" for "overly tannic," but here I mean: How much can you taste the alcohol? Roughness is usually pretty undesirable in wine - it shouldn't have an obvious alcohol sting to it. Now you have seven scales. None of them are mutually exclusive, not really! It's certainly possible for a wine to be sweet and acidic at the same time, tannic and fatty at the same time, et cetera. Ideally, it would be possible to taste a wine and assign it a value on each of these seven scales. It wouldn't be perfect ... but someone looking at those scales would at least have a decent idea of what to expect from the bottle. And someone who only liked sweet, fruity wines could look at the scales for a very tannic, acidic wine and realize that perhaps this was not the best choice to purchase. I'm getting to the point. Honest. Bear with me. It strikes me that we need a system like this to describe other things. The one I have in mind in particular is music. Wouldn't it be ideal if we could take a CD, rank it on eight or ten scales, in such a way that someone else looking at the ratings would at least have a decent guess whether or not to waste money on the CD? I mean, music is a complex thing to taxonomize that way ... but then again, so is wine. And in both cases, once you've opened the package, you're basically stuck with it.
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