The Colours and Smells of Asia

Try visiting a rural village in India in the heat of the Indian summer. You are likely to experience a sea of colours – red chillies left to dry and shrivel. You hear the hawkers with mounds of huge mangoes on their carts and spices galore on the roadside all inviting you to buy some. There is the overwhelming pungent aroma wafting in the air while you wipe your brow dripping with salty sweat.

Then you go to the spice shop where you see these spices converted in to ground powder neatly stacked in sacks. It is a glorious and breathtaking array of colours.

Let’s digress and return to the West and pour a glass of white wine labelled Gewürztraminer, Viognier, Riesling or red wines labelled Malbec, Syrah, Merlot or Zinfandel. These wines are also supposed to be spicy. I am an Indian and I would expect these wines to be red-hot pours that would singe my tongue upon my first sip or swirl.

I have tasted most of these wines and I am expected to experience hints of vanilla, cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg, cloves and black or white pepper. I can’t say I have sensed the aromas or the tastes of all these spices but when I have deliberately focussed on one or two spices in my mind, there seems to be some truth to this claim.

But then I begin to wonder whether it was my mental picture of a spice that made me experience that spice in that wine or in fact my tongue actually tasted that reality. Am I deceived by the wine rhetoric or am I not a connoisseur yet to “see” these spices in wine?

Anthropomorphic Wine

Let me introduce you to someone I have become acquainted with over the last two years. She is has a lovely character, somewhat demure at times. She rises to the occasion by being elegant and classy at dinner parties. She dresses up and expresses elegance while revealing her legs just a peek. As for looks, she is sexy and full-bodied and some would say voluptuous. As for her personality she may come across as complex but really she is sensitive and sheds a tear or two at times. When cornered she can be assertive or gutsy but not aggressive. She has a nose for picking (pun unintended) the aroma of food and drinks and has a palate of the queens. I reveal my admiration for her with a bouquet of red roses.

She is no other than the one I love and adore – WINE.

In the paragraph above, I have highlighted in italics a handful of words used to describe wine. Being humans we have a natural tendency to project human words onto inanimate objects. This type of expression is called anthropomorphism. Some words imply action or motion but when used with a static object they accentuate its character. For example, the wine descriptors such as aggressve, gutsy, bold and demure create impressions in our minds of a person expressing through action or behaviour the characteristics symbolised by those words. Other nouns such as tears and legs are anatomical metaphors hooked on to the liquid called wine.

The appropriateness of such anthropomorphic terminology or the personification of wine is the subject of debate on this blog. To what extent such words truly enable a wine enthusiast to learn about wine I leave that question for you to answer. I do often wonder if the novice wine drinker on hearing these words, is not so much learning about wine but is being introduced to a new wine culture or to a world of wine snobs.

If I had sent you an email with just the first paragraph, would you have guessed that I was talking about wine? Is there an alternate group of words you can come up with that bettter describes wine?

The Corpus of Wine Fans

A corpus is a collection of linguistic data of “real-world text” used for language analysis. I decided to do a simple experiment this week on a small sample of “real-world” wine words to see what it reveals. Social Networking sites are great to gather such samples. It so happens that I manage a Facebook site for wine drinkers. This Facebook wine site has over 80,000 fans and they simply share their daily experiences on anything to do with wine. I gave them as simple quiz to list all the words they use to describe the wines they drink or had drunk before. I gave them 1 minute to do this. Around 120 fans participated and came up with a total of 1612 words. I then used special software used by linguistic scholars to analyse this corpus. In this instance, I asked for the frequency of occurrence of these words, from the highest to lowest.

Here are the top 20 words they use: Dry, Fruity, Sweet, Smooth, Earthy, Good, Rich, Buttery, Full, Aromatic, Chocolate, Bold, Crisp, Bodied, Delicious, Spicy, Cherry, Deep, Finish, Fruit. What can you discern about the drinkers from these words?

Now look at the demographics. 66% of the fans are female; the majority of the respondents are aged between 25-34 (46%). Only 5% represent the age over 45 and 25% are aged 18-24. In answer to another question these fans said that most of them spend under $USD 20 per bottle on their wine purchases.

If you have to put this Facebook fans into some category, where would you place them? Are they wine enthusiasts, connoisseurs, wine experts, collectors or plain plonk drinkers?

If this group is a representative sample of today’s generation of wine drinkers, why do we need all the other snobbish or academic wine descriptors? Or do you feel that they need to be more educated in wine words or they will transcend into the connoisseurs’ world and use their sophisticated vocabulary in 10 years from now?

Oenophilia and Linguaphilia

The two words in the heading of this post express the passion a person has for wine and words. The Greek word philia, often translated as love is not actually correct. It has more to do with mutual friendship or brotherhood rather an intimate relationship that lovers have. Philia is not to be confused with eros which is used for lust or sexual relationship. There is also the ultimate expression of love called agape often used by Christians to define God’s unconditional, undeserved or divine love where it is expressed in terms of Christ’s death on the cross for mankind who despised and rejected him.

No matter what, wine cannot exist without a relationship with words. The expression “Hmmmm” after drinking a glass of wine could be taken as cacophony to denote bad taste but more likely to be accepted as a commendation or approval as “Hmmm” in the Western culture is positive affirmation.

In the domain of oenophiles there seems to be little consistency in the relationship between wine and words. I guess this is because emotion and other physical and sensory factors are involved. You may describe your wine because you like it as opposed to love it or you worship it as god. Alternatively you can be purely clinical, academic or simply lost for words and use expletives instead. You may of course equally express disdain, hate or distaste using negative words and swear at it.

As a linguistic scholar, I looked for an authority on language who has a passion for wine and one who has conducted research on wine and words in a formal and empirical manner. Yes there is such a person called Professor Adrienne Lehrer I have bought the latest and revised second edition of her book called “Wine and Conversation”. It is a fascinating book which gives a great background to wine; the types of wine drinkers, the wine descriptors used by the various groups of oenophiles and most importantly her research findings on whether there is a relationship between wine and words. You will be amazed with her theories and conclusions. You can order it directly from this blog.

It is worth asking yourself whether the words you use to describe wine are from a philial, erotic or a divine perspective. You may consider yourself an ordinary wine drinker, an oenophile, a connoisseur, a Master of Wine (MW) or a knowledgeable wine critic or writer. But I strongly recommend you buy yourself a copy of Lehrer’s “Wine and Conversation”, as it could change your vocabulary and attitudes and perhaps your preconceived ideas a hell of a lot.

Like Lehrer my passion is for wine and sociolinguistics, that is wine, language, society and culture. These are more than intertwined as the vines in the terroir of any country. If wine and words are inextricable then where does culture, let alone the artificial strata created by the wine culture fit into all this?

Personality, Sex or Gender in wine

Human beings are multi-faceted and their character or personality are complex and sometimes needs a psychologist or psychiatrist to unfathom them. Yet wine connoisseurs use anthropomorphic metaphors to describe wine as if it has human characteristics.

I have both male and female chestnut trees on my farm for pollination purposes but the end product of wine represented in a bottle as a liquid seems to evolve its own discernible sex or gender. So some describe wine as being masculine or feminine. How would one know this?

Others ascribe human personality traits to wine in the use of descriptors such as open, closed, generous, approachable, reserved, classy, refined, polished, vivacious, unpretentious and so on. Can you imagine Champagne other than being vivacious? Can a red wine be described as bubbly? Well, that’s all the very positive side of humans, how about the negatives? Do we have stupid or dumb wines? Can a wine be punk?

In our pre-economic crisis days I have heard wine described as hedonistic and decadent. Have you described your wine as being sexy or seductive as well? Do we need to append “bunnies’ to go with it? After all the bailouts we hear in the news, would we add new wines words such as “foreclosed”, and “bonus” wines? Which wines would you think would qualify for these appendages?

Now to jump into some controversy, can I dare ask you if wine vocabulary will evolve to include descriptions such as a gay or lesbian wine or indeed use not just adjectives but proper names of people to attribute to wine the good or bad (the modern equivalent of Robin Hood, The Ripper) character of the famed and the notorious?