The last time you quaffed a glass of Chianti Classico, did you pause in your pleasure to gaze at its colour and inhale its aroma? Stopping for a few seconds is all part of the entertainment when it comes to wine tasting. While sommeliers teach the best methods to observe wine and elicit its scent and flavours, the fun part—for yours truly, anyway—is conjuring up words to describe the sensations you encounter along your vinous adventure.
There are some words that cannot be messed with, sommelier or not: ‘bouquet’ refers to the aroma of an older wine, ‘body’ to the wine’s weight due to its alcohol content, ‘tears’ or ‘legs’ are the markings left by a full-bodied wine on the glass as you swirl it. There are entire reference works dedicated to technical terminology, but that is not where the fun is to be found.
In the world of wine, the aroma descriptor for Chianti Classico is ‘farmyard’; for Barolo, it’s ‘tar’; while top wine critic and author of The Oxford Companion to Wine, Jancis Robinson, goes as far as describing the scent of Sauvignon Blanc as ‘cat’s pee on a gooseberry bush.’ Amusingly, a friend of mine once attended a blind tasting, at which a bottle of red was unanimously declared as sapere di gabbia (smell of birdcage).
Coming up with trigger words to describe the aroma and flavour of wine is a pleasurable activity in itself, a bridge between the sensorial and the intellectual.
Describing wine is key to selling the stuff, too, of course. If you pick up a bottle in a supermarket, and the label professes ‘an up-front and straightforward wild-berry character, with hints of baking spices, plush tannins and good ripeness,’ you will probably opt for it. If the label reads, ‘smells of birdcage,’ you are likely not to bother. Save the ‘birdcage’ for tasting sessions among friends.
