We are, among other things, two friends who write about wine. We are sometimes distressed by certain ways wine is written about that strike us as unproductive. It frustrates us both, because we share a desire that wine writing can (and should) be both persuasive and beautiful. After all, an object (and Terry would change “object” to “being”) of beauty deserves to be written about beautifully.
We agree that it is tiresome to criticize other wine writers, but we find it appropriate and useful to pose some skeptical questions to “wine writing” as a genre.
At times, the landscape of wine writing looks so troubled and compromised that we wonder whether it is salvageable. Those are low moments. As we started thinking about how this piece would look, we thought to begin with a kind of credo, a statement of affirmation that wine writing is worth doing. The rhetorical question we asked ourselves was, “Why write about wine?” We shared a few statements quite spontaneously, without cogitation. Some of what we said is as follows.
Wine is a sensual experience with an object with which we engage, and the story of that engagement is worth telling.
Related
Writing about wine is a worthy attempt to surmount the limitations of language in describing both flavors and evanescent states in general.
Wine belongs to a culture consisting most crucially of the people who make it, and whose stories are well worth telling.
Wine also belongs to a culture of people who drink and appreciate it, and it is worth considering both why and how.
Content from our partners
Wine can obtain the status of a “being” with which we may engage in a nexus of freedom to respond to its ethereal and spiritual possibilities.
Wine writing prompts writers and readers to think more deeply about their experiences. Writing is thinking, and thinking is hard. It asks the writer to work.
Wine is a lens through which to view cultural practices, customs, and transformations. It’s a topic but rarely the story; it invites us to consider what the story really is.
Some people want to read wine writing. That’s glib, but there are still many readers who want information and insights about wine.
Having thus agreed, we revved up Zoom and let fly.
Meg Maker: My sense is you and I share—
Terry Theise: —a certain unease or dismay with much of the way wine is written about—
MM: —and discussed.
TT: Although most people would probably say the world of wine writing has never been healthier: There’s room for more voices than ever before. But our motivation is the sense that all is not well in the matrix of wine communication. If people were drinking wine like they did ten years ago, and wine was trendy, and everybody was talking about it; if wine was robust and functioning, then it would be, like, Who cares how people write about it? But all is by no means well right now, and we who do publish about wine have an obligation to use the platforms we have to make wine as appealing as possible.
MM: You’re known for glorious descriptions of tasting experiences. What aspects of wine do you think are most important to articulate through language?
TT: Gestalt, first of all. The overall shape and form. I do think texture is more important than flavor. The wine will tell me how it wants to be described. But overall: What kind of a personality does it have? Is it yummy? Is it delicious? Is it easygoing? Is it complicated? Is it challenging? Is it aloof? Then, if the wine has a succession of small-F flavors that seem interesting, I’ll write them down. This is something that grizzled old veterans like you and me tend to forget: When we started off taking tasting notes, we did it so that we would remember what we had tasted. I think we should never let go of that primordial motivation. We do it to remember. But I also find that taking out the pen and paper draws me away from the moment in a way that has become less and less necessary for me.
MM: I find it exhausting. I do it. I have to. But there’s a real difference between making notes on a couple of wines open at dinner or having a flight of five different wines at a single producer, and sitting down for a tasting where you’re asked to evaluate 40 or 50 of the same typology. Pretty soon it’s like, Well, it’s Barolo. It tastes like what Barolo tastes like. Maybe this one has a celery note, and so all I really have to write for number 56 is “celery.” That will never fly in a magazine. I’m sure you’ve experienced this, say, tasting a slew of the same vintage of Riesling, from Pfalz or wherever. They’re all kind of the same.
TT: Yes—with the Mosel, especially. I wanted to develop a little dingbat that I could use for the umpteenth time that I wanted to write, “slate, apple, and lime.”
MM: The way we taste is really unfair as a professional practice.
TT: Totally standing up and applauding. As soon as I heard you say, “tasting 50 Barolos,” I thought, that is like the Fourth Circle of Hell.
MM: The first day of that particular press trip, they poured us 160 wines.
TT: The jet-lag day.
MM: The jet-lag day. It was absolutely brutal. Even when you’re paraded to various producers, have a nice lunch with them, all normal press-trip stuff, you’re still getting only five minutes per wine, scribbling notes furiously. Many colleagues push back on this idea that there’s anything wrong with the way it’s being done. Many of us are ahistorical: We don’t view our work as part of a legacy, a trajectory. We assume we’re doing well because, well, it’s what we’re doing. It’s an argument from macroeconomics—like, this must be the wine writing we want because this is the wine writing we’ve created. But it grew up organically around certain demands and constraints, right? It can change.
TT: I think that if you taste comparatively any more than 15 or 20 wines, you’re judging them and evaluating them and ranking them, but all you have done is to contemplate how they “performed” in a contrived situation where they were lined up with a bunch of other wines. And that’s a very particular situation. I would describe it as a false situation, because it’s clear that by the time you’ve tasted 15 or 20 wines, your palate is befuddled, and I don’t think any human being is talented or smart enough to do a proper evaluation of wines under those circumstances. But is it a necessary evil or just an evil?
MM: I wrote an essay once about wanting to taste five bottles before writing about a wine. I want to taste it over several days. I want to taste it in another month. Making proclamations about what a wine is on a single day with a single bottle just feels wrong.
TT: Because it is wrong. As long as we make it clear that our impressions are partial impressions, based upon a whole host of circumstances that prevailed when we were tasting the wine, and based on our subjectivities and proclivities, then that’s okay, but only with that caveat. Everything I publish on my website has been tasted at least three times over a period of days. And I try to vary the circumstances as well. You can create a tasting note that isn’t cohesive if you’re not really careful, but I try to make it clear to my readers.
MM: You disclose your process so readers can make their own decision. Unfortunately, disclosure can invite criticism, accusations of being sloppy or having a bad palate—like, “You must not be a good professional, or you must not have trained your palate correctly.”
TT: If they accuse you of a lack of professionalism because you can’t taste 50 wines, I would accuse them of lack of professionalism for assuming that they can. I don’t think it’s possible to render a reasonable professional judgment of any wine if it’s part of a sequence of dozens and dozens—unless you are really virtuosic at self-knowledge, and you understand what happens to your palate under those circumstances and you allow for it. But who does? Everyone who has to write oracular, authoritative, tasting notes that affix a categorical value to this wine with a point score attached to it. And a lot of those people are really good and have fantastic palates—palates that are maybe more acute than mine, and they may have figured out how to allow for this phenomenon. But I’m sorry, in my little dinky Terry world, I don’t think they can do it. In fact, I insist that it can’t be done.
Against the catechisms of tasting
MM: Do you know the wine lexicon of the Wine & Spirit Education Trust (WSET)? At the bottom of the list of terms, there’s a note saying it’s “designed to be a prompt and a guide which you do not need to memorize. You can pass the tasting exam with distinction if you use the descriptors in the wine lexicon, but you do not need to limit yourself to these terms, and the examiners will accept other descriptors, so long as they are accurate.”
TT: “Accurate.”
MM: Right? Presumably, if you describe La Tâche as “lemony,” sorry, ain’t gonna fly. So, this, I think, is also part of the problem, because new people feel they have to study this in order to have credibility in the profession. It’s hard to be an autodidact now, because the world of wine is so vast that people rely on classes, and in classes they encounter these protocols and grids as the right way to describe experience. Here’s another thing: We make holy the tasting exercise.
TT: Yes, yes.
MM: And so we say to a consumer or to someone new to wine, “You must enter the church and learn the rituals in order to be part of this religion.”
TT: “This is the catechism of tasting.”
MM: It’s misguided and leads to a doctrinaire approach, when it should feel more improvisational. It should be spiritual, intuitive.
TT: And it’s off-putting. Also, I mean, obviously, a certain number of geeks are going to find their way in and find this whole exercise quite fascinating. I didn’t want to forget to say this, and it’s going to be a parenthetical insert. Wine doesn’t make people wine geeks. They were already geeks, and whatever it is they approach, they approach in a geeky way, and wine doesn’t make people snobs either. They were already snobs, and when they approached wine, they found a very welcoming avenue for their snobbism. But I think we need to rid ourselves of the notion that geekiness and snobbism are sort of ineluctable to the experience of apprehending wine. Which brings us into the topic of tasting notes, which, I’m beginning to feel, other than their practical application, are more and more absurd.
MM: And self-referential. They make claims toward objectivity and universality that send a false signal to the reader.
TT: Most writers who are excellent tasters are still offering the laundry list of descriptors in their tasting notes.
MM: The laundry list happens because people reach for analogy or metaphor to keep the text interesting. Because inherently it’s not that interesting.
TT: It’s not.
MM: So, people take poetic license, waxing lyrical about taste. It’s over-focused on flavor. Throw texture in if you want, but we’re essentially talking only about the organoleptic properties of the wine. I’ve been researching the vocabulary and linguistics of wine writing, its methods and approaches and style, and how these reflect and express cultural attitudes. There has been an evolution over the decades from evaluative toward descriptive language. Can all wine writing be literary? No—sometimes you need to bang out tasting notes about 20 Pinot Grigios. But the shift in the way we have been talking about wine is tied to globalization, cultural influences, and the expanded access given the sheer numbers of SKUs [stock-keeping units]. The wine expert of the 1950s and ’60s—European, anglophonic, without what we would consider formal credentials—were experts on the wines and could make evaluative statements: “This wine is good, this wine is bad, this wine is typical, this wine has great finesse.” They could characterize the wine because everyone who read them actually knew what that wine was like. Everyone knew what La Tâche was like—
TT: One hopes!
MM: —because they were writing for a rarefied constituency. Then, the writing became more commercial; there were more wines to talk about, and wine writing became more descriptive. The consumer wanted to know, “Well, what does it taste like? I don’t know what La Tâche tastes like. Tell me what it tastes like.” So, we got these bifurcated approaches. On one hand, we had the academics like Amerine and Roessler, Ann Noble, the WSET, which codified lexicons of terms. On the other were Parker and other critics who popularized the fruit-salad tasting note. They were quite different pursuits, in a way, but they converged on the same net effect, which was the heavily olfactory tasting note. And then that form influenced marketing writing, and vice versa, and pretty soon one can’t tell the difference between the tasting note written by the critic and the tasting note written by the winery.
TT: It’s getting more and more difficult. In the good old days, there were fewer wines, fewer places from which wine came, and there was a fairly codified template of relative quality whereby the classics were understood to be the classics. And then the ones on the rung just below the classics were considered up-and-coming classics, or the possible future classics. What have you now? It’s a miasma. I find, to the degree that I open wine magazines at all, if I see an article on, say, Petit Manseng from Uruguay—which does exist; I drank one once, and it was not very good—what sort of a person must you be, other than an Uruguayan or a grape grower, to fall upon an article like that? What does that say in a semiotic or a meta sense about who we are and who we’re writing this stuff for?
MM: In your writing, you lean into the description of your experience of the wine.
TT: I follow where the wine seems to want to lead me. There are certain wines for which I’m interested in their succession of flavor nuances, and I will write these as they occur to me. But there are other wines where that seems to be impertinent. I know this is going to sound high-flying, but I don’t know how else to say it: I regard the wine as an equal, not as an object to which I bestow all the miraculous precision of my astonishing palate. It’s an equal being. And the story I want to tell is, How does it wish me to engage with it? That’s why some notes are very discursive and metaphorical, while fewer notes tend to be more matter of fact. It just depends on the wine.
MM: I like the idea of wine as an equal being. I like to read about those epiphanic moments, to experience them vicariously. We have a modest cellar, a modest budget. I do travel to taste wine, but often those wines are far too young.
TT: When I’m asked how I know a wine is great, my answer’s always, “A wine is great when it takes you away from itself.” There are certain wines that demand to be set aside as aesthetic objects, because they have a story to tell you, and you follow where the narrative leads. You can end up writing dithyrambs and poetic paragraphs. I’ve gotten lucky, because when tasting with growers, they often pull old wines out of their cellars. I think the experience of profundity is much more likely to be found with old wines than with young. I remember once writing a note at Gaston Chiquet, who’d opened a ’53, which is my birth year. I had just turned 60, and that wine really took me into questions of mortality. I’m writing and writing and writing and writing, and my other colleagues were kind of shaking their heads, going, “Jesus, that is a long tasting note.” I said, “No, I’m sorry. It’s not a tasting note. It is my dialogue with death. And I’m not going let you read it, either!”
MM: Wine writers often focus on a producer’s backstory, to help a consumer-reader understand the human element. The wine is the wedge, the way into the human story. I focus on that in my work, but people still demand tasting notes. Like when I’m assigned a column, there must be three or four wines at the end, with tasting notes. Why, if we can agree that it’s all subjective, do we still need them?
TT: I was just in Austria, and one of my favorite wineries is the family Hiedler, in the Kamptal. Those wines have always been imprinted with the personality of the producer. Now, his two sons have taken it over and are subtly and not so subtly adapting the old style. At first it was just like, It’s the same pizza with less cheese, but now they’re making more consequential changes. The father, looking at the changes his descendants are making, could feel, like, “Man, they’re ruining the style worked my whole life to create.” On the other hand, he’s, like, “Man am I lucky that I have anybody to take this thing over.”
MM: It sounds like the children are changing the personality of the wine, and so you have to have a different discussion with that wine than you would with the father’s wine.
TT: Exactly. First they did it on an experimental basis, with one conspicuous wine to see if they enjoyed the results. They asked me, and I said, “I like it very much; this wine is masterly.” The question is, if you start making all your wines like this, will they be Hiedler wines, as Hiedler wines are understood? Or can you subtly alter that understanding so that there’s a new portrait of Hiedler wines?
MM: Over the years, you personally have contributed to the group portrait of that wine, along with other independent reviewers. What is the role of the collective voice about a wine in the world? Dozens of critics writing notes, reading each other’s notes, bringing their knowledge about the vintage, style, family history—all of that builds a narrative about the wine. More famous wines will have a more definitive outline, whereas others are vaporous.
Wine is not art but craft
TT: The articles about the larger questions of grape growing and winemaking are ever more interesting than the smaller questions. It’s something you do very well, which is to say what interests you most about wine is certain of its larger contexts, particularly culture, family, human story, without which wine is denuded of several dimensions, which are the things that make us think it matters. I also see wine as an aesthetic being that is not art but shares with art a pull of beauty.
MM: No, it’s not art. It’s a craft.
TT: Right. And it’s an object—or a being—of beauty, sometimes at least, and that confuses the issue because we think if we have feelings about something beautiful, then that is equivalent to art. But it’s not. And if we make that argument that, you know, wine is art, then we’re guilty of diluting what art actually is.
MM: Exactly. I trained as a fine artist, both in practical studio application and the historical aspects of art production. No, wine is not art; it’s a craft. There is artfulness involved in executing a craft, but it is still a consumer good. It is a functional object. It does not exist for strict spiritual or aesthetic or didactic reasons. It exists to be consumed.
TT: It’s true it exists to be consumed, clearly, because without consumers paying money for bottles of wine, then the whole wine community would just collapse. I agree with you, and I would only go that one step further; even if it’s only one or two percent of the wine world, if it’s only a minuscule percentage of the kinds of wines that really can stir a person, then that is something to which I insist attention must be paid. And the only way properly to depict it in writing is in a literary or sort of essayistic format, where the daisy chain of descriptors seems really futile and useless, almost luridly so. Must we reduce this to the number of associations you can pull out of your addled mind? I’m guilty of it, too, at times.
MM: Someone recently saw a memoiristic wine essay that I wrote and said, “Fine, but who’s the reader?” I replied, “I assume limitless intelligence but limited prior knowledge.” It makes the writing more approachable to more people. I’m still talking about wine, about wine concepts and history, but I’m not diagramming its technical qualities. We spill so much ink on the technical complexities and realities of wine; think about vintage reports, regional profiles, producer profiles, et cetera. These pieces often aim to “demystify” wine, to explain it. But they also assume readers want to have wine explained to them, that they can actually learn by reading, and that once “educated” they will value wine and subsequently learn to love it. I think the demystifying lesson-making instead robs wine of its inherent interestingness and complexity, which is, ironically, what makes wine attractive and lovable.
TT: Your memoiristic writing is obviously for me the most interesting, but that says more about me than it does about your writing. I think people who got into wine through New World wines got sent off on the garden path, because in many cases [the wines] were explained by how they were made rather than where they were grown. People internalized that information and thought, “Oh, this is how to be an expert in wine—to be able to talk about malolactic fermentation, punch-downs, all this stuff.” It denuded wine of anything there really was to love about it. In wine, not only is the whole greater than the sum of its parts, it’s entirely different from the sum of its parts. An otherwise smart person with an active, sensual life who is growing more curious about wine can be enticed through lyric writing, imagistic writing, emotional writing. I remember someone writing about drinking Musigny and saying, “I took one sip, and my mind was filled with every beautiful thing I had ever thought or experienced.” The meta message was that such a moment could occur, and that fired my imagination. That’s what led me into wine.
MM: That breaks my heart, because I almost never have that experience. It used to be more common before I knew much about wine, because every new experience seemed complex and engaging. But that’s not happening as often to me anymore.
Who reads tasting notes and why?
TT: Here’s a question, both rhetorical and non-rhetorical: Who actually reads tasting notes? And why should anyone read someone else’s tasting notes? Even if you just want to know what wine to buy, you can do that—I hate the sound of my voice saying this—by the score. Or if somebody has tasted 50 Burgundies, they don’t even have to give you the score, they can just say these were the best ten. Why do you need to read the tasting note?
MM: I don’t know. I struggle with why. But I have to write it, because the act of articulating what I’m tasting invites me to pay attention to many dimensions of the wine.
TT: Exactly.
MM: And that’s important. But who reads them? Pick up a copy of a wine magazine and flip to the back, the part with tasting notes. Do people read them, or do they just look at the score and the price? Is it strictly a bang-for-the-buck calculation in the consumer’s mind?
TT: And if they do read them, are they using them to make purchasing decisions? Because if you have somebody reviewing St-Joseph, and one note indicates a nuance of blueberry and the next note indicates a nuance of acacia blossoms or whatever, is the guy who likes blueberry zeroing in on that descriptor and going, “Oh, I will like this wine because I like blueberry”? Or is it more likely that if this person ultimately tastes the wine, he or she may not find the blueberry note that the writer put in.
MM: She’s not going to, no.
TT: And then will they be disappointed? In my own writing—and I don’t know whether I succeed fully in this—I try to make the tasting note, in effect, a transcript of the engagement. If you tell the story of the engagement rather than just stringing a bunch of associations together, then you perhaps have something. That’s where you can make a case that some other human being should read this.
MM: Exactly.
TT: You do it, and you do it beautifully as well. I’m thinking about your Tuscan piece and how that might have been written by a writer less good than you—which is to say, most other writers. Eighty percent of their text would be spent on the viticulture, all of the little minutiae of the winemaking, tasting notes, and scores, and you wouldn’t have had any sense of the hills and rivers and valleys, let alone the nature of the people.
MM: The people, the place, the history… The story has layers, and that’s what’s interesting to me. It’s tons more work to write a piece like that. I have to be paying attention all the time—like, I’m standing in the producer’s vineyard with the wind in my eyes and my notebook and pen, and they’re handing me a glass and describing their history, and I’m juggling all of my kit and trying not to miss something important. So, I have to do a lot of research later. I am fortunate to have the luxury of time, because those pieces take 30 or 40 hours to write after I’ve done the trip.
TT: But the nice thing about a piece like that, and others like it, is it’s worth keeping. That is something that I think really matters. A lot of wine writing is simply disposable once it has fulfilled whatever its ostensible purpose is—usually mercantile or showing off how adorable a palate the writer has.
MM: Disposable because it’s transactional. Also because wine itself is ephemeral. But to that question from a few minutes ago, Who reads tasting notes? One answer is people who are looking at a back label. If there are tasting notes on it, they’re going to read them. And if there are tasting notes on a shelf talker, they will read them. That means that a lot of people are reading the writer who’s penned the juiciest note. Okay, so first question: Does anyone really read them? We publish them. We spill a lot of ink on them. Does anyone really read them? But also, second question: Do they say anything true?
TT: Could they be true? And if so, are the writers losing opportunities to make them true, or is it impossible for them to be true? In which case, what are we doing?
MM: I think it’s possible for them to be true, provided we agree that they’re a memoiristic exercise—my personal experience of this thing that happened. But I don’t think that’s how they’re posited or received. Especially if they’re twinned with a score. They’re perceived as objectively true rather than subjectively true. I think it’s possible for them to be subjectively true: Terry writes subjectively true notes on wines he tastes.
TT: Yes, as faithful a recording of my experience of that wine, of that bottle, of that wine at that moment. All of which is unrepeatable, because, as we know, bottles vary, and we vary, and you can’t repeat any of it. But what you can do is, as accurately as possible, try to transcribe what happened. And sometimes what happened stops at the lip of the glass, and other times what happened was something broader and deeper. But then people will accuse you of being ethereal or nebulous. I remember someone criticizing one of Hugh Johnson’s books, saying, “He never says what the wine tastes like, only what it was like to drink it.” And, well, that there is the point, dear man!
If you have a panel of three or four really good tasters—people you know and respect—what can they be objective about? They probably agree about the color but won’t necessarily agree about the aroma. They may agree about the strength of the aroma. Then you come into texture, where you would think to have a broad area of agreement, but each individual has his or her own physiognomy in that moment. And then, once you get down to flavor, you might get people to say, Okay, well, this wine is particularly floral, or this wine is fruit-driven, or—God help us!—someone might try out the M word and say, “Well, I’m getting a lot of minerality,” and then the others will issue gales of derisive laughter.
MM: And another will say, “Actually, I think it’s just reduction.”
TT: Right? Yes, exactly. So, what does it amount to? Any one person’s note is going to deliver you further away from falsity than the aggregate note of a panel, and I know that’s contrary to the conventional wisdom—the idea that the panel, by virtue of its disagreements and variances, is going to give you a more three-dimensional version of the truth of any given wine. I just don’t necessarily see it that way. I think it ends up being a kind of a cacophony, people being what we are, even good tasters who like one another and are comfortable tasting together, and you know—
MM: —willing to concede points. And generous toward one another and toward the wine.
TT: Right, and don’t compete with one another. We have all seen tasting panels where it becomes a competition to see who can trot out the most esoteric association, the most absurd, ridiculous, or futile one. I’m trying not to use the word otiose, because I use it all the time. It is the perfect word, but I always feel just a bit twee when I use it. Here’s another question: If you are someone who likes peaches and nectarines and you see peaches and nectarines in a tasting note, would you like that wine?
MM: Me, or the reader?
TT: Both.
MM: It doesn’t work for me. Because I’m deeply skeptical that I’d taste the same thing as the writer. I might taste tangerine. But if I’m being told by someone, “This tastes like peach and nectarine”—which are close analogs—that will prime me to look for peach and nectarine.
TT: The placebo effect.
MM: I know this to be true from having poured wine for people at tastings. If I mention a term, they will think, “Oh, yeah, I taste that.” Whereas if I had given it to them blindfolded, they might not even know whether it was white or red. There’s a lot of anchoring that goes on in wine writing. If you share a specific flavor first, they’re going to look for that flavor. And then if they don’t get it, they’re going to feel stupid. Even in professional tasting situations, the winemaker sometimes will say, “There’s a lot of peach in this wine.” I try to plug my ears. It’s hard to unhear it. But I do get a little thrill when I’m with a group of tasters and someone across room says, “Wow, I’m really getting celery,” and I’d just written celery in my own notes. It feels like I’m part of a community of practice.
TT: It’s rare when it happens. There are certain molecular chains responsible for aromas, and they repeat in wine; but as a rule, most of the associations, with a handful of exceptions, are not literally true. If they’re true at all, they’re ethereally true or metaphorically true.
MM: Sure, there are certain compounds that can be directly detected—Brett and TCA and sugar, diacetyl, whatever—but otherwise we resort to metaphor and analogy. Which brings up the reference frame: Do we assume the person will understand our references?
TT: It is a lock that you can pick, but only by understanding your subjectivities and then announcing them clearly. If I’m frothing and spuming over some wine I adore, and the reader says, “Yeah, but that’s Terry’s kind of wine, the kind of wine he likes,” then I feel, like, “Wow, I did my job. I established my proclivities so clearly that the person could say that.” But some wine writers are less willing to do that, because if they announce their subjectivities, they undercut the value of their scores.
MM: I think that’s absolutely right. Acknowledging their humanity, their failings, their preferences, their taste scrubs away the polish on the so-called objectivity. It’s just that there are only so many objective things that can be said about a wine. Only a handful. Everything else is subjective. We need to be more human about it all and not pretend we’re laboratory instruments. It’s much more interesting to tell the story of the engagement with the wine than it is to try to affect some imperial objectivity and write a daisy chain of descriptors. Wine is an experiential product, and we can bring our subjectivity and our personal insights to bear, stake out private boundaries around our lived experience. We don’t need to make grand claims toward universal truths. There are some objective truths about the wine that can be written about. And of course the subjective truths can also be written about—but they shouldn’t be written about as if they were objective truths.
TT: Precisely. Exactly.
Toward the more personal and subjective
MM: So, if we are in absolute agreement about that, then the question is, How do we shift the project away from claims to objectivity and declarative statements—“The wine is like this”—toward a tone that’s more personal and subjective: “The wine is like this to me”?
TT: I’ve been doing this for 30, 40 years and have a reasonable historical context, palate context, palate memory, into which I can place this wine and give you a fairly reliable idea of its relative value, and that’s useful. But I think that if we want to get people outside of the shrinking wine community to take pleasure and comfort reading about wine, then we have to do it in a more contextual and—if you will—literary form that is worth keeping, that’s worth saving.
MM: “Worth keeping” is a really interesting point. When I’m writing a piece like that Chianti one, I’m hoping to make a piece that’s evergreen but also could appeal to someone who doesn’t drink wine or think that much about wine, or even know anything about wine. Wine is just the topic. But it’s not the story.
TT: We’ve talked about the many felicities of your writing as such in that piece, but the meta message a reasonable reader of goodwill would carry away could be encapsulated as, “This sounds like a really lovely world.” Wouldn’t you like somebody to walk away from that piece, close the magazine, or power down the screen, and just think, Wow! That sounds like a really lovely world. As opposed to thinking, “I’ll never understand wine, because I’ll never understand this—”
MM: “—it’s too abstruse.” Yes. But I think you need to show yourself. You need to show your hand as a writer. I’m a strong believer in using the grammatical first person in wine writing, because I think you have to show how you know what you know. You have to demonstrate your own subjectivity.
TT: That’s how we infer: This is the kind of person she is, because this is what she noticed.
MM: I think there is some really great literature waiting to be written that uses wine as a topic but not wine as the story. I want to read that work. From that person’s perspective.
TT: I agree with you about that, and I think that a multiplicity of points of view is useful—provided one doesn’t make a fetish of one’s point of view. Wine is like live music or theater. It’s kinetic. It’s happening in front of you, and it’s changeable. It’s not like recorded music, which is always the same each time you play it; or film, which is always the same each time you see it. People want to wrestle wine into a frozen aesthetic place, where it’s like the film and not like the theater performance.
MM: There’s something about performance where the actors need the audience, and the audience needs the actors. The same is true with wine. Wine is an experience good. It doesn’t exist until you drink it. It’s like Schrödinger’s cat: Until you observe it, it isn’t in one state or another.
TT: It’s just potential energy, locked up in its little glass prison. When we drink it, it becomes kinetic energy. It’s only perfectly and truly itself in the nanosecond. When it enters the palate, it mixes with our spit, and once you’ve got it in your mouth for 20 seconds, how much of that liquid is your saliva, and how much of it is the original wine?
MM: The wine is becoming diluted by your body, but you can also think of it as the wine and your body finally in dialogue.
TT: True.
MM: And this is the whole point of wine: Wine is made to be consumed. This is its purpose. It is fulfilling the purpose for which it was made. This goes back to whether it’s a craft or an art. It’s craft, because it allows you to use it. You can use it. You can take it in and experience something. There’s an obvious effect of every wine, and there are subtler effects of specific wines.
TT: And sometimes it’s a metaphor for peace and contentment, or it’s another kind of an avenue of bliss in a pleasant occasion. I have a dingbat I sometimes use in my notes where I just put glug, glug, glug—as soon as you drink the wine, you know that is its purpose. It simply wants to be slugged down. You can imagine all the places where it might be perfect to slug it down, maybe by the water, having oysters, or sitting on a terrace with the Tuscan hills in front of you. But you know that wine’s manifest destiny is to get into your body as quickly as it possibly can.
MM: The hotdog of wines.
TT: And the other thing is: Don’t bypass that moment of delight. Why the paucity of the word “delicious” in tasting notes? Is that somehow not sophisticated enough for us august palates?
MM: There’s a linguist who’s done work on so-called expensive and cheap wine words. So, boysenberry and velvet and cocoa are used in tasting notes for expensive wines, and juicy and tasty and pizza are used for cheap wines. Also, more expensive wines have longer tasting notes. I mean, to be fair, there’s more to say.
TT: They’re more complex or multilayered. If you have the patience to taste them lingeringly, by the time you’ve lived with that wine for 15 or 20 minutes, its end is different from its beginning—and sometimes could not have been inferred from its beginning.
MM: The end changes the beginning—for you, too. Because you’ve changed by having had a dialogue with the wine.
