Why do we smell everything in the world in our glass? Except grapes? And how do you detail the experience? Why describing is more challenging than evaluating.
Easy to Like, Hard to Explain
Wine does not duplicate the smell and taste of grapes. Muscat, incidentally the world’s oldest known grape variety, is the rare exception to this rule. If wines did indeed taste and smell like table grapes, there would be little need for the comments of wine writers. To describe a wine as grapey is not a compliment. What most of us think of as grapey is what wine professionals call foxy, and that term usually refers to wines made from vitis lambrusca, a class of indigenous American vines that includes the concord grape. Instead of dealing with Latin and obscure information, however, remember that if it smells and tastes like grape juice or grape jelly, it’s not a wine you should be drinking.
Virtually all the wines we drink are made from grapes that belong to a class called vitis vinifera, native to Europe but now grown throughout the wine producing world. All our familiar wines—chardonnay, cabernet sauvignon, merlot, for example—fall into this category. In the process of being converted from grapes into wine, by fermentation and aging, something magical happens and the wine takes on characteristics that, while they may be inherent in the grape, are only realized as a result of the winemaking process.
Wine professionals, and increasingly the rest of us, then try to define what is there in the glass. The most basic way to describe a wine is by comparing it to other fruits or to vegetables, usually berries and plums and black or red fruits for red wines, and citrus, apples and pears for whites. Critics use less common garden produce as well as elements such as tobacco and leather. The far end of the description scale is more boldly associative and makes use of such terms as asphalt, chalk or barnyardy.
My approach to wine writing is as a consumer, and I try not to use jargon, technical terms and overly imaginative metaphors. But it is impossible to describe a wine without certain comparisons, or at least no one has come up with the right language yet. Describing a wine, I find, is more challenging than evaluating it.
Most of the comparisons relate to the smell, for a simple reason. Our nose perceives many more scents than our mouths do tastes—though not nearly as many scents as our dogs do. There are four basic tastes—sweet, sour, bitter and salt—but there are endless scents. Some wine critics build a virtual firewall and separate scent and taste entirely. I find that in spite of the documented scientific separation, the senses cross over and scent and taste are intimately bound together. After all, the nasopharynx links our mouths and noses.
I use the word scent here advisedly. Aroma is used by wine professionals in relation to young, not fully developed wines that smell of the grape and the fermentation, and they use bouquet in reference to more complex mature wines. I’m careful with the distinctions when talking to the experts, but in my writing I make no differentiation and use whatever sounds correct in the context of the sentence.
I also like the word nose. Admittedly, it can sound a bit pretentious depending on the speaker or writer, but it sums up a lot. Then again, there is nothing wrong with the word smell. But whatever word you use, you’ll almost never follow up by saying that the wine smells of grapes. Go figure.
