Mind Your Language!

How our language shapes the way we taste

There are endless permutations of this scenario.

The main actors in the scene are: a glass of wine, two tasters of differing abilities and an unhelpful dose of awkward silence. It plays out across lunches, dinners and tastings in restaurants, kitchens and tasting rooms around the world.

Taster A (less experienced) lifts glass to nose: Oh, this smells familiar. I can’t quite put my finger on it. Its? long pause I’m not sure

Taster B (more experienced): go on, what do you think?

A: Strawberries?

B: (with remarkable authority considering they had just spoken at length about how you “couldn’t buy a sense of smell”): No, no. Its cherries. It’s cherries and roses, not strawberries.

explanation about the wine ensues. All failed attempts at guessing the smell correctly slowly fade away…

The opening of my article on recoding cider referenced the language we use to described orange wines and the language philosophy of Wittgenstein. Though I don’t want to write some navel-gazing philosophical article on philosophy, I do think that the philosophy of language or, more generally, the way in which we use language deserves more time spent on it.

Whilst being able to blind taste a wine and accurately deduce where its from and what it is is little more than a party trick (a very impressive one nonetheless), being able to accurately describe what you like in relation to wine is a far more useful skill.

Accuracy of description in this context, as I will explain, is more about mutual understanding of terms over outright technical accuracy. Announcing you like wines with high levels of rotundone to the person behind the counter at your wineshop might be technically more accurate than saying you like “peppery wines” but this accuracy comes at a neglect for the fact that you are engaged in an information transaction where mutual understanding is the priority.

This is, hopefully unsurprisingly, what language is for. For the most part, English is pretty good at fulfilling this role - at facilitating communication.

There is, however, a problem:

In English, there are very few words dedicated to the description of flavour (and even fewer for aroma).

The main dedicated words in English are for the 5 tastes: sweet, salty, bitter, sour and umami. It is very indicative of linguistic deficiency that a sentence with “words in English” includes a Japanese term.

All these words are dedicated to the description of specific stimuli and do not rely on the invocation of another sense in order to convey their meaning. Much like trying to make primary colours by mixing other paints, trying to describe what you’re actually tasting when your tasting, say, sweetness is impossible – unless you want to go into descriptions of GPCRs and how taste works but I don’t think that would serve you any better.

The language that is used for olfaction (smelling) is no better. Unlike flavour, there are no “primary smells” in the same sense of the 5 tastes and so sight is relied upon much for heavily. English olfactory vocabulary is essentially split in two, source-based and evaluative e.g. grassy/fishy/smells like feet for the former and fragrant/rancid/pungent for the latter.

Most words used for flavour in the English language also rely instead on sight - and this is where difficulty arises. Taste and smell are so instinctively predicated on sight that when the visual cue is removed, when someone is smelling a wine that contains the same aroma compounds as elderflower but don’t have the visual stimulus before them, they instantly come down with a case of “I recognise this smell but I can’t quite put my finger on it”. Then show them some pictures of flowers one of which is elderflower, and they will pick it out with confidence.

Chris Van Tulleken demonstrated this reliance of taste on sight very well in his Royal Institute Christmas lectures in 2024, giving the audience banana flavoured jelly beans whilst showing them a picture of pears and them all saying they were tasting pear, not banana.

Umami (and Kokumi), where language gives up

At risk of passing off individual experience as universal, I remember when everyone started talking about umami and not having a clue what it really was. There was mention of “savouriness” and “meatiness without the meat” but it was only when I dipped my finger into a packet of MSG (a highly recommended experience) did it become clear.

An added difficulty for describing umami in the context of western cuisines is that it is never purposefully added to dishes. Sure, tomatoes, anchovies, aged cheeses and Worcestershire sauce all have the necessary peptides to deliver umami but that is never the primary motivation for their addition. If tomatoes are only ever added for their tomatoeyness (colour, acidity, sweetness, texture) then of course, linguistically we will never develop a need to describe that “somethingelseness” about them - thus we loan a word from a culture that does describe that.

We might soon be approaching a similar situation with yet another Japanese word: Kokumi.

Having been to lectures given by Danish flavour scientists, read what Harold McGee has to say and asked my taste science professor at university what it is, I am none the wiser.

If you’re interested, you can read this note about Kokumi by Sam Cooper. I think it perfectly sums up English language deficiency when it comes to taste. A chef, writer and content creator as established as Sam, can only take us so far in his description (which, contrary to what he writes, I do not think clarifies anything)

To clarify this is different from umami, which makes food taste savoury. Kokumi makes food feel satisfying.

Despite the association that a “good taster” is one who is able to accurately deduce what fruits and flowers they are smelling, the bulk of wine’s unique language is for describing flaws, not any desired aromas/flavours. TCA (cork taint), mousiness, V.A. and Brett in particular all describe specific smells that don’t rely on sight.

However, all of these words for faults are closer to diagnoses than they are descriptions. To use the example of the sense of sight, diagnosing a flaw is much closer to being able to deduce that a painter is using oil paint instead of watercolour, where describing a wine as “cherry on the nose” is closer to differentiating the different tones of the painting.

Mousiness still presents an interesting example since it is a word that derives neither from the source of the flaw (e.g. TCA, Brettanomyces)¹ nor does it outright describe the sensation (i.e. volatile acidity) - it stands alone as a word dedicated to specific stimulus. It’s still not particular useful however, aside from the fact that perception relies on individual mouth pH, at the end of the day it is still a word for a flaw. It might be far more specific and exacting than descriptors like balsamic/cherry/green but nobody in their right mind would go into a wine shop and ask for a mousy wine.

Playing the game

Language is a game. The language used for wine is its own game within that. Playing the wine game outside of the context would be to stand, green banana in hand, gently sniffing it before taking a bite and extolling the virtues of the banana’s “fine tannins”. That would be insane. Repeat with a glass of wine and this becomes normalised.

Within this game, its important to point out something that seldom gets acknowledged outright with regard to speech: Words are defined by their usage, not by their dictionary definition.

“Aromatic” and “mineral” are both interesting examples of this. “Aromatic”, outside of chemistry labs, refers to anything that has an aroma and yet in wine it is used to differentiate between “aromatic” and “non-aromatic” grape varieties (e.g. Gewürztraminer and Chardonnay respectively) despite all grapes having an aroma. Is that wrong by its dictionary definition - kind of? yet it still used and accepted.

On the flip side, “mineral” has come to represent a general collection of smells, tastes and mouthfeels that often said to have come from the rocks that the grapes have been grown on. Consistently proved wrong ( George Nordahl provides a great breakdown here) and yet still used but not without a heavy serving of pushback from some people due to inaccuracy.

I understand why there is pushback. “mineral” is in a similar camp to “natural” in the sense that, unlike “aromatic” their usage implies more than just the presence of a characteristic in a wine – i.e. that a wine has a higher mineral content or that a wine is more natural than another².

Is it inherently wrong to use them? It’s hard to say. Their use in communication certainly seems to serve a purpose to certain degree but at the same time they carry unhelpful/confusing implications.

A lot of these terms were developed for education and consumer focus group purposes hence they needn’t pass muster for any scientific accuracy.

The wine aroma wheel you have blu tac’d to your kitchen wall is a product of the desire to describe wines in a such a way that there is mutual understanding, not pinpoint accuracy or correct identification on a chemical level. It has been honed, over the past century or so, so that people can be delivered a standardised wine education allowing them to taste wine to a given standard and to facilitate market research allowing focus groups to communicate “what the consumer wants” during product trials.

Take that away and you are in the Wild West of Wine description. There’s tumbleweeds rolling through the main square of the town where a group has gathered to battle it out over whether to call it Orange wine or Amber wine or Macerated wine or S**n-C****t wine.

Their guns are in their holsters.

It’s a Mexican standoff.

A bead of sweat rolls down one of their foreheads…

…until someone can be overheard in the nearby natty wine bar asking for a glass of something “quite natural but not too funky but still with a bit of funk” and all of a sudden they seem to have bigger priorities…

Point being, tasting a wine isn’t as daunting as we think but describing it is probably far more challenging than we realise. When you feel like you recognise a smell or a taste in wine but ‘can’t put your finger on it’ (a hugely ironic idiom considering fingers are neither used in taste nor smell) remember that is not your sense of taste or smell that is the problem, it the very language/tools you are using to describe it.

Describing wine is like trying to thread a needle with oven gloves on. You can perceive the required specificity but you simply don’t have the tools available to you to do it justice

One last thing

In spite of the fact I’ve spent a fair portion of this article arguing that words are defined by use and not by definition, I do have a bone to pick with one specific term that crops up in descriptions of wine all too often:

…notes of cider…

No. It doesn’t. Your wine doesn’t taste of cider. That’s about as accurate as saying the weather on your birthday is going to be “very Tuesday”.

It is likely the mass produced “cider” that is made engineered to hit just one tasting note, that being:

• Apple

that is likely responsible for the frequency of cider as a tasting note. However, it has just become lazy shorthand for wines (very often, though not always pet-nats) that are some combination of cloudy, high in malic acid, coarse tannins, “fruity” and possibly the product of a fermentation that could be a bit cleaner.

Aside from being vague/unspecific, it does a huge injustice to the work of phenomenal cider makers (who I will eventually get round to covering in more depth) who, just like great winemakers, task themselves every year with making their best representation of time and place out of the fruit they work their magic on. Your use of the word cider isn’t changing year on year but the cider that is being made is - something isn’t right

Further reading/watching:

Bold’. ‘Elegant’. ‘Introverted’? How words describing wine get lost in translation by Allison Creed PhD

Cultural differences in wine flavour perception by Sietze Wijma

1. I also wouldn’t say it derives from the smell of a mouse either. It is largely sensed retronasally, something that can’t be said of the smell of mice, and is far more specific a stimulus than mice could probably ever be (though i’ll admit I’ve never smelled a mouse)

2. An example of this where less is implied is “specialty coffee”. The term brings with it its own sense of “speciality” but this is still far more subjective a term than the likes of “natural”.