As a habitual wine drinker and a former wine columnist, I regularly slog through articles and books filled with the fanciful, extravagant, mystifying babble used by writers whose prose is deeply disconnected from the beverage they pretend to describe.
One such writer, ransacking nature for imagery to promote a French wine, paints a regional Burgundy as “a good mountain stream that could one day become a long, peaceful river.” The celebrated Robert Parker, turning to the city for similes and metaphors, describes a 2000 Bordeaux as “a towering skyscraper in the mouth without being heavy or disjoined.” Other writers regard wines as if they were mental patients with psychopathologies: Spain’s Ribera del Duero from Bodegas Reyes has been called “more brooding than cheerful.” A small dose of such criticism is enough to make the common reader rejoice when he or she hears a plain-speaking Englishman pronounce his beverage “a jolly good wine.”
As these examples suggest, contemporary literary-oenological styles of writing are diverse. However, that diversity is superficial; in fact, the language that the majority of American wine writers use falls into three categories. Two of those were popular in the middle and late part of the 20th century, when they were eclipsed (but not entirely obscured) by a third style of rhetoric, which has become more and more popular.
Until recently, Americans have described what they drink using just two languages, both abstract and neither, oddly enough, linked directly to wine: the language of social class and the language of gender.
Of the two, the language of class has been the more pervasive. In the 1964 edition of Frank Schoonmaker’s Encyclopedia of Wine, for example, Portugal’s best red wine is characterized as “full-bodied, extremely fruity, [but] somewhat lacking in breed.” By contrast, French Sauternes from Château Coutet is praised for “great distinction and breed.” Frontignan’s muscat, another sweet, French white wine, has “considerable distinction and real class.” (Schoonmaker’s Encyclopedia grew out of a series of wine columns in The New Yorker, published around the time of the repeal of prohibition in 1933; until recently, and through several editions, it has been the American oenophile’s bible.)
Although less ubiquitous, the vocabulary of gender has a more venerable legacy than the language of class; it goes back at least as far as the Victorian literary critic George Saintsbury, who, according to Schoonmaker, described a red Hermitage from France as “the manliest wine” he had ever drunk. Like the language of class, the language of gender bestows praise and blame, but in more nuanced shades.
The red wines of Morey-Saint-Denis and Chambolle-Musigny are distinguished from each other thus: Morey’s wines are “big, hard, assertive -- the reverse in every way of the Chambolles,” which are “delicate and feminine, with beguiling grace and a captivating, warming bouquet,” according to the early editions of Alexis Lichine’s Encyclopedia of Wines and Spirits in the 1950s.
For Lichine, who viewed the reds of Gevrey as “robust, assertive and strictly masculine” and the whites of Meursault as “soft, round, and feminine,” the dichotomies of sex and gender were fundamental to any understanding of wine. A chateau owner whom Newsweek dubbed the pope of oenophiles (according to the book jacket of Lichine’s book), Lichine was emphatic about that contrast when he wrote of French wine.
About the time of Frank Schoonmaker’s death in 1976, descriptions of wine in America began to shift from the language of class and gender to the language of fruits and vegetables. A recent Wines & Spirits account of a 1998 Argiolas Costera called it “a garden of southern Italian flavors, from sun-baked black plums and fresh, fuzzy figs to almonds, fennel, and cherries. Crisp, lemon-like acidity provides the freshness of a sea breeze.” Such passages suggest that, like cookbooks, wine guides are modern forms of the pastoral, a literary genre inventing idealized, imaginary, and nonsensical images of country life for the amusement of city dwellers.
This new pastoral language has been widely adopted in the United States, and has also spread to France and the United Kingdom, where the English translation of The Hachette Wine Guide: The French Wine Bible declares that a La Clarière Laithwaite offers aromas “of almond, cocoa, marsh flowers, irises and undergrowth.” The same lexicon pervades the wine columns in The New York Times, which recently described a glass of Madeira as “a big, full, brash wine [which] raced for each corner of our palates, gushing oranges, golden raisins, brandied cherries, licorice, mint, and maple sugar.” Gushing indeed.
Such descriptions focus on produce with a romantic, idyllic, and halcyon aura. Banished are parsnips, onions, carrots, potatoes, and other roots with lowly ties. Wine writing recoils from vegetables that make gas or blight the breath, like beans and garlic. Naturally, it shuns brussels sprouts, broccoli, and other vegetables forced upon us as children.
It favors picturesque foods like asparagus; green, yellow, or red bell peppers; lemons; oranges; and apples. And it goes for fruits over nuts and vegetables, especially fruits that are high in sugar. It is particularly fond of cherries, Asian pears, peaches, melons, plums, figs, tangerines, lychees, and pineapples. While it also shows a preference for exotic foods like papaya, quince, guava, passion fruit, and mango, its all-time favorite is the berry: strawberries, raspberries, blackberries, boysenberries, mulberries, gooseberries, cranberries, blueberries, and bilberries.
Although fruit lies at its core, the new nomenclature radiates out in other directions, chiefly culinary. The Wine Enthusiast’s tasting notes for a bottle of Hidden Cellars finds that its 1997 zinfandel displays “an appealing mix of nut, cocoa, anise, oak, and black fruit on the palate. Opens with paprika and cinnamon, plus cocoa aromas; closes with a definitive vanilla-anise-oak tang.” Along with an assortment of herbs, spices, and baking ingredients, wine narratives include everything found in today’s kitchen: raw materials like honey, olives, bacon, meat, and coffee; processed foods like tapenade, marzipan, and chocolate; quasi-edibles like violets, tea roses, dried leaves, beeswax, and green tobacco; inedibles like oyster shells, camphor, and stones; imponderables like “orange-scented peach,” “precious, very roasted wood,” and the titillating “corrupt cherry.”
Then there’s this account of Standing Stone Pinot Noir, in which “intense aromas of caramel-cola, black cherries, and wet dog give way to a medium-weight, silky palate that offers dark chocolate and cherry flavors.” Other bizarre references include new saddle leather, pencil lead, seaweed, ash, smoke, Band-Aids, iodine, beef blood, and creosote. Who among us distinguishes beef blood from, say, pig’s or chicken’s? And is it really possible for one wine to smell of multiple, antagonistic aromas like “coffee, violets, prunes, smoke, toast, and game”?
Questions probing the accuracy of this new lingo lead to broader ones about why it has won such widespread acceptance, defining the way Americans perceive -- or imagine -- the 565 million gallons of wine they spend $19-billion on yearly.
One answer lies in an obscure but initially influential book published the year Frank Schoonmaker died. In 1976, Maynard A. Amerine (an oenologist) and Edward B. Roessler (a mathematician) wrote Wines: Their Sensory Evaluation to establish a scientific vocabulary of organoleptic terms -- expressions aiding in the sensory evaluation of wine. To that end, the two professors offer a glossary amounting to an index of forbidden wine-tasting words, though they do not give it that undemocratic title. In a preface to their glossary, these two professors from the University of California at Davis’s department of viticulture and oenology do admonish: “It is not our intent to condemn the following terms (although some of them deserve it) for your wine vocabulary, but merely to warn you to use them with caution, if at all.”
From the realm of class, Amerine and Roessler purge “coarse,” “common,” “breed,” “elegant,” “heavy,” “noble,” “ordinary,” and “well-bred,” reserving special scorn for “finesse.” From the sphere of gender, they outlaw “big,” “masculine,” “robust,” “sturdy,” “feminine,” “fragrant,” “lithe,” “perfumed,” and “delicate.”
But Amerine and Roessler’s book did not, by itself, banish the vocabularies of class and gender. And though the book’s science (impressive algebraic formulas adorn the volume) played a role in discrediting Schoonmaker’s and others’ aging terminologies, it did not establish the pastoral paradigm replacing them. The death of the old language and the birth of the new followed a cultural shift in late-20th-century America that has not drawn the comment it deserves.
In the United States (as in England), France and Italy have long stood as models of contrasting cultural and social styles. France represents urbanity, cynicism, artfulness, formality, protocol, high theory, elitism, snobbery, and propriety. Italy stands for naturalness, informality, accessibility, practicality, spontaneity, optimism, intuitiveness, and family feeling. Those contrasts are apparent in movies, literary philosophy, couture, cuisine, wine, and, most recently, education. (Italian styles of child care, emphasizing creativity and spontaneity, are being studied not just by Americans, but by the French themselves, who now view their own system as overregimented.)
In the middle of the 20th century, when the specter of Italy’s fascist past still lingered, Americans looked to France for cultural models. French was the language of diplomacy; the adjective “French” was synonymous with the “best” in wines and restaurants everywhere; movies by Truffaut and Godard defined the avant-garde in cinema.
But when Reagan’s “morning in America” political optimism and Clinton’s prosperity ushered in a period of serenity in the 1980s and ‘90s, an increasingly self-confident population sought styles of living that embodied informality and familial ease. That casualness drew Americans to Italy. Italian movies like Cinema Paradiso, The Postman, and Life Is Beautiful eclipsed French films in popularity; Bella Tuscany displaced A Year in Provence, the latter enduring through so many sequels only because it celebrated the Italian part of France. Marcella Hazan trumped Julia Child; and impenetrable French menus spawning tiny portions of food drowning in egg-butter-cream sauces yielded to Italy’s cornucopia cuisines, prepared in olive oil, now elevated to a medical wonder.
Following the triumph of its cuisines, Italy’s Barberas, Pinot Grigios, and Chianti Classicos began to challenge their French rivals. Viewed as more accessible and less costly than astronomically priced French wines, they brought with them the pastoral associations and language of the Italian campagna. Where these bucolic connections and vocabularies had been embraced by oenophiles like Parker, the zest for all things Italian nourished and sustained them, bestowing on such pastoral allusions the naturalness and validity they needed to take root and flourish.
Today, as a result, it is impossible to mass market any wine on American television using French imagery. Political fashion has helped discredit gender referents, so that to praise a Rhone as “manly” or to speak of “the fragile yet resolute charm of feminine wines” is to sound comically old-fashioned. And economic pressure to market a worldwide glut of wine (overproduction runs at 25 percent annually) has made invidious allusions to social standing, high or low, seem snooty. Meanwhile, creating Italian-sounding brands like Mondavi, Gallo, Martini, and Sebastiani, or depicting large, noisy families gathering around Mediterranean feasts has become the preferred way to pitch wines, regardless of their true nationality.
Finally, casting wine, in words or images, as so many heads by the Milan painter Giuseppe Arcimboldo (who fabricated allegories of the seasons out of pears, peaches, cherries, and nuts) gives it the appearance of a health food. Here at last is a natural medicine that keeps the doctor away, but promises to gratify the flesh, not mortify it. Composed of nature’s bounty drawn from the four seasons, wines enjoy irresistible appeal to aging boomers obsessed with their physical well-being. Reinvented as those fruits and vegetables touted by physicians and governments as the best defense against cancer -- not to mention heart disease, dementia, and hip fractures -- wine metamorphoses into one of the most powerful prophylactics in our pharmacological arsenal, along with olive oil and green tea.
Clearly, 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.
Sean Shesgreen is a professor of English at Northern Illinois University and the author, most recently, of Images of the Outcast: The Urban Poor in the Cries of London (Rutgers University Press, 2002).
http://chronicle.com Section: The Chronicle Review Volume 49, Issue 26, Page B15
