The last couple of weeks, I've been giving introductory wine classes to a group of very interesting women.
Although most of them are seasoned wine drinkers, they're newcomers to the practice of sniffing, swirling, sipping and spitting. And, like nearly all learning tasters, they're wrestling with the challenge of putting words to the smells and flavours of wine.
I remember there were times, when I started tasting wine, I thought I would never get it. People around me were rolling off lists of descriptors like plum, cherry, black pepper and spice, while I was thinking it smelled sweet and jammy at most.
As an exercise with wine students, I sometimes have them call out the descriptors they find in a glass of wine and I write them all on a board. While a class of, say, 12 students can come up with 30 or more different descriptors, it's not nearly as random as it seems.
One student will find lemon, another will find lime, another grapefruit. Different descriptors, yes, but all in the citrus fruit zone. It can be the same with smoke, cigar and tar, or yeast, toast and bread, in that they all fall with similar ranges of aromas and flavours.
While identifying aromas and flavours is a necessary exercise and a very good skill to have, I do sometimes wonder how useful it is to fill wine reviews with long lists of fruit, spices and other smells and flavours. Did anyone ever buy a wine because it had flavours of plum or aromas of black pepper?
If you're a wine consumer who simply enjoys wine and doesn't need to know how to taste and describe (the way I love to drive but have no interest in my car's engine as long as it works), I'm not sure what good it does to tell you that a particular wine delivers sweet plum and cherry with hints of eucalyptus and black pepper.
And some reviewers seem to delight in stringing lines of descriptors together. I once read one that listed 19 descriptors. It was so confusing that I had no idea what the wine could have tasted like: there was no sense of which flavours were dominant and which secondary.
It seems to me that the most useful reviews note the aroma and flavour profile (say, "intense black fruit and berries") but focus more on the style: whether the wine is full-bodied or light, whether it is crisp, fruity, acidic and tannic.
In other words, I think the most useful reviews lie somewhere between those idiotic reviews that gush, "Wow! Yummy!" (which tells you nothing) and the self-indulgent reviews that aim to show how clever the reviewer is for finding so many flavours.
Any thoughts on this?