Interesting piece! Language can really be a pain in the ass sometimes, even if we don't go full late Wittgenstein and make the whole thing a mess.
I did have two questions:
1.) I was reading Eric Asimov's How to Love Wine recently and he has an essay in there (idr the exact title, it had "tasting note" in it) where he argues against the use of flavor words in wine descriptions more or less at all, instead preferring an older-style of more experiential / metaphorical descriptors, which he views as more functionally useful. Do you think that's where we ought to go, if our flavor words aren't serving? I admit I'm a little persuaded by it myself.
2.) On the cider point, how complicated does a category have to get before using the category term becomes useless? For me it's the "coffee" note. What people have in mind when they think of that describes neither one of the blueberry bomb Yirgs from the 2010s or a floral Gesha, let alone all the weird coferments people are doing now. But I still understand what people mean when they say "coffee" as a note. To my mind it seems like an example of language being useful to convey a mutual understanding of the sort you're talking about here, even if it's disrespectful to the depth of the category as a whole. Is cider different for you?
Hell, people use "wine" as a flavor note for coffee, sometimes with "red" or "white" appended, but nothing more specific than that.
It's a really tricky subject! I appreciate your being so methodical about it.
These are great points. I'll try to answer them as best I can.
As yet, I've never read the Asimov so I can't address his exact argument though I did study under Nicola Perullo, author of "Epistenology" and "Taste as experience" amongst other titles. Perullo argues what seems like a similar point to Asimov's though goes a step further by saying that wine doesn't exist in this abstracted sense that we create for it when we are critically analysing wines (e.g for wset) but instead are constantly changing depending on the situation and company we are drinking them in and therefore our understanding of them should include this dynamicism. In "Scritti gastronomici corsari" (I believe only published in italian) he argues for the development of "communities of taste" who can create their own ideas of good and bad when it comes to taste such that features that are classically considered "flaws" aren't necessarily considered as such. I personally think all that is a bit too much. A point score is great if you're buying in-bond as it provides a layer of objectivism that benefits trade but it's quite useless if you want to seek out wines based on stories and interest. Personally I'd say people should lean into the experiential a lot more (much like Oz Clarke describing a bottle of Leoville-Barton as "like a dragon had sucked out the sweetness from the fruit and just left the quintessence of fruit") when it comes to describing wines for their own benefit. When it comes to communicating with others, to discover new wines that are similar to those that you already like, is where a common 'somewhat objective' language helps.
The coffee point is an interesting one. Could it possibly be that the word that has been ascribed to the sensation of "general roastiness with a slight fruitiness" happens to be "coffee"? I'd be interested to find out if the "coffee" descriptor is used in other cultures around the world when describing wine (see the Sietze Wijma conference I linked at the end for similar points). That being said, there is a shared chemical compound in both - furfuryl mercaptan. It is absent in green coffee beans but is produced during roasting. Likewise, toasted oak barrels contain furfural which combines with hydrogen sulfide (produced during fermentation) resulting in the synthesis of furfuryl mercaptan during fermentation. It's possible that seasoned coffee drinkers then are able to just smell past the "general" coffee aroma to differentiate further nuance since the "coffee" smell in coffee is a given. In the case of cider, what further irritates me is the implied negativity in its use. It is most often lumped in with "kombucha" when people decide to pick the low hanging fruit for their wine blogs and tell all the reasons why "natural wine" is terrible. Though I realise this is probably coming from a place of ignorance, not malice
Interesting piece! Language can really be a pain in the ass sometimes, even if we don't go full late Wittgenstein and make the whole thing a mess.
I did have two questions:
1.) I was reading Eric Asimov's How to Love Wine recently and he has an essay in there (idr the exact title, it had "tasting note" in it) where he argues against the use of flavor words in wine descriptions more or less at all, instead preferring an older-style of more experiential / metaphorical descriptors, which he views as more functionally useful. Do you think that's where we ought to go, if our flavor words aren't serving? I admit I'm a little persuaded by it myself.
2.) On the cider point, how complicated does a category have to get before using the category term becomes useless? For me it's the "coffee" note. What people have in mind when they think of that describes neither one of the blueberry bomb Yirgs from the 2010s or a floral Gesha, let alone all the weird coferments people are doing now. But I still understand what people mean when they say "coffee" as a note. To my mind it seems like an example of language being useful to convey a mutual understanding of the sort you're talking about here, even if it's disrespectful to the depth of the category as a whole. Is cider different for you?
Hell, people use "wine" as a flavor note for coffee, sometimes with "red" or "white" appended, but nothing more specific than that.
It's a really tricky subject! I appreciate your being so methodical about it.
These are great points. I'll try to answer them as best I can.
As yet, I've never read the Asimov so I can't address his exact argument though I did study under Nicola Perullo, author of "Epistenology" and "Taste as experience" amongst other titles. Perullo argues what seems like a similar point to Asimov's though goes a step further by saying that wine doesn't exist in this abstracted sense that we create for it when we are critically analysing wines (e.g for wset) but instead are constantly changing depending on the situation and company we are drinking them in and therefore our understanding of them should include this dynamicism. In "Scritti gastronomici corsari" (I believe only published in italian) he argues for the development of "communities of taste" who can create their own ideas of good and bad when it comes to taste such that features that are classically considered "flaws" aren't necessarily considered as such. I personally think all that is a bit too much. A point score is great if you're buying in-bond as it provides a layer of objectivism that benefits trade but it's quite useless if you want to seek out wines based on stories and interest. Personally I'd say people should lean into the experiential a lot more (much like Oz Clarke describing a bottle of Leoville-Barton as "like a dragon had sucked out the sweetness from the fruit and just left the quintessence of fruit") when it comes to describing wines for their own benefit. When it comes to communicating with others, to discover new wines that are similar to those that you already like, is where a common 'somewhat objective' language helps.
The coffee point is an interesting one. Could it possibly be that the word that has been ascribed to the sensation of "general roastiness with a slight fruitiness" happens to be "coffee"? I'd be interested to find out if the "coffee" descriptor is used in other cultures around the world when describing wine (see the Sietze Wijma conference I linked at the end for similar points). That being said, there is a shared chemical compound in both - furfuryl mercaptan. It is absent in green coffee beans but is produced during roasting. Likewise, toasted oak barrels contain furfural which combines with hydrogen sulfide (produced during fermentation) resulting in the synthesis of furfuryl mercaptan during fermentation. It's possible that seasoned coffee drinkers then are able to just smell past the "general" coffee aroma to differentiate further nuance since the "coffee" smell in coffee is a given. In the case of cider, what further irritates me is the implied negativity in its use. It is most often lumped in with "kombucha" when people decide to pick the low hanging fruit for their wine blogs and tell all the reasons why "natural wine" is terrible. Though I realise this is probably coming from a place of ignorance, not malice
I had a couple more thoughts on this but thought it made more sense to write them out in a full post! They're here if you want to check them out: https://stephentaylormarsh.substack.com/p/whats-the-use-of-flavor-notes-anyway