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?
1 comments:
Adon, I enjoyed your blog very much. You have a gentle, thoughtful way of expressing interesting concepts. I like the way you often finish with a question. It tempts response.
Cheers,
Bob Campbell MW
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