A tasting is an event when a group of people gather to try wine and to talk about it. As an academic linguist, I am quite interested in the latter. I want to know what vocabulary they use, what acts of communication, what grammatical forms. Over the last few months, I have attended a few dozen tastings with producers in Germany and in France, both as a wine lover and while accompanying an MW wine journalist. Here is what I heard.
Tasting talk
You might be surprised to learn that we know very little about how people communicate at wine tastings. Since Michael Broadbent’s seminal essay on how to taste wine, much has been written on the topic; communication at tastings, by contrast, has received practically no attention. And yet, the stories of the infamous Judgement of Paris are primarily about communication at the event. For example, the demand for Steven Spurrier, the organiser, to return the scorecards to one of the judges is nothing more than an attempt to control both the channel of communication and the message.
The communication scene of a wine tasting is deceptively simple: producers tell tasters about their wine. But as I moved from tasting to tasting, I was struck by how different the events were – not because of the wine or the ambiance. The main difference was how I was communicated with. On the one hand, were producers who offered their spiel (or not – after all, apparently, wines can speak for themselves) and disposed of questions efficiently, focusing on their presentations. Questions quickly vanished, as only one side of the communication space was filled.
Alternatively, tastings became dialogues when producers opened the channel of communication for the tasters, not only encouraging comments and questions but also starting conversations. Imagine a producer asking the attendees to speak about the wines amongst themselves. She opened a new channel of communication and then quickly joined in. Such a clever communication trick meant that instead of having two parties on either side of the tasting table, the presenter created one group of people simply chatting about the wines being tasted.
Drab technical details
Talking about wine can mean different things. All too often I kept hearing about residual sugar, tanks, oak, and so on. All could have been done via email. Yes, the technicalities were sometimes accompanied by the producer’s ‘wine philosophy’, but, more often than not, it sounded much better than it was.
But sometimes I heard stories of people engaged in the production. What is it like to collect grapes on the steep slopes of the Mosel? What is it like to see mildew eating up the grapes in Chablis? Or about how the producer’s neighbours helped in the winery and eventually drank the wine. At such tastings, we drank wine made by a real person, from grapes collected by real people, whose cousins, aunts and grandparents were also involved in the hard work. Wine became social and dialogic. Well, wine became ours.
Does it matter? It matters whether you see a tasting as a series of spoken tasting notes or as a story about a community making the wine. In a nutshell, is it not more interesting to hear the story of a winemaker proud of her wine, or despairing of hail, or even talking about the nebulous respect of the terroir, than to hear about apple, citrus, melon or some other combinations of the universal fruit salad (surely, someone should have come up with the ‘UFS’ abbreviation)?
If wine is to offer conviviality and togetherness, then I want to attend tastings at which wine is shared with me by those who made it. I want to hear ‘we made the wine’ and not ‘the wine is’. As a linguist, I would say that I want tastings done in the first person, not in the third. It is through the grammatical first person that we can share our experiences of the wine, as it was made and tasted.
The personal touch
There is an aside to be made here – I think considerably more wine writing should be written in the first person. Time and again, wine drinkers are told that wine is subjective and yet, this subjectivity disappears in the shackles of the grammatical third person. Third person is for telling about wine as it ‘really is’. I doubt this is the best way to write about wine.
And so, producers, don’t just tell me about the wonders of your wine’s flavours. Take me for a walk through your vintage, take me through your excitements and despairs. Invite me to look at the world through a glass of the wine you made and, please, do not test my ability to sense the medium-plus level of acidity with developing tertiary aromas. Not only will I have a better time, but I will also see your wine as true — or authentic, as it is now fashionable to say. I suggest therefore that you treat me as a person who likes wine and with whom you can talk about it, and not as a data-receiving device. Time and again, it is the former treatment that made me buy the wine. Because I was buying wine you made and not a liquid with some objective qualities that I either could not sense or did not care about.
Prof. Dariusz Galasinski is full professor at the University of Wroclaw.
The views and opinions expressed in debate pieces are those of the writer, and do not necessarily reflect the views or positions of the publication. They are intended to provoke discussion and debate. If you would like to offer your own response to this or any other article, please email the editor-in-chief, Anja Zimmer at zimmer@meininger.de.
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