In a paper originally presented to the Pinot Noir and Identity Symposium at Oxford University, Meg Maker charts the evolution of writing on Pinot Noir, from the evaluative, to the descriptive and metaphoric.
“We talk about Cabernet the way we talk about sports.
We talk about Pinot Noir the way we talk about religion”
—Terry Theise1
All languages evolve, their vocabularies and vernaculars enjoying cycles of emergence, expansion, standardization, modernization, and reinvention. Such a cycle has radically transformed wine discourse over the past 50 years. Examining the evolution of the languages, lexicons, and motifs of wine writing reveals our ever-shifting attitudes toward the meaning and value of this singular beverage.
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During the early to mid-20th century, English-language wine writing principally attended to wine’s provenance and typicity. Writers trained their lens on wine’s cultural and geographical origins, its “social versus hedonic” signature, its character versus its flavor. Wine writing was evaluative, the critics rendering judgments based on their earned expertise and domain knowledge.
As the century progressed, and as globalization expanded access to the world’s wines, demand rose for detailed insights to support connoisseurship. Wine commentary began to emphasize wine’s flavor and olfactory impressions, and the writing suddenly bloomed with metaphors. Wine writing became more descriptive, the critic populating notes with words to catalogue their hedonic experience.
As this descriptive style grew fashionable, it began to morph. One style, advanced by academics and wine-credentialing organizations, relied on structured vocabularies, systems of descriptors that allowed a taster to detail wine’s sensory impact free of subjective connotations. The goal was to arm industry professionals and connoisseurs alike with tools to ensure consistent and objective commentary.
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Another style was more affective and poetic. It was embraced by wine critics and popular commentators and swiftly drove demand for highly rated wines. Lavishly descriptive, it was inventive, emphasizing wine’s subjective over objective truths. Some critics rose to prominence championing this style. The descriptive approaches deviated from the older forms that emphasized wine’s cultural signature, leaning instead into the impressions it made on an individual taster. It was a shift from origin to experience, from “What is this wine about?” to “What is this wine about to me?”
Winespeak isn’t new; nor are the jokes about it
First published in The New Yorker, a 1937 cartoon by humorist James Thurber shows two couples at a table raising glasses of dark wine. The male host announces, “It’s a naïve domestic Burgundy without any breeding, but I think you’ll be amused by its presumption.”2 The female host is smiling, but the other couple have raised their eyebrows and screwed their mouths into quizzical frowns. The man’s pronouncement about the wine seems like a simple sendup, but a second reading reveals that he’s actually disparaging the wine, and wine snobbery along with it.
The cartoon was published shortly after the 1933 repeal of Prohibition. The American wine industry had immediately cranked up production but was having difficulty winning customers who were unaccustomed to drinking wine. Some books appeared to try to persuade and educate, but many were marred with errors, really “laughably bad,” according to American wine historian Thomas Pinney, who argued, “Much of their effect was, unfortunately, to produce wine snobbery—that child of ignorance wedded to anxiety—and just as much was to perpetuate misconceptions and misinformation.”3
It didn’t help that wine was more associated with Europe than America. Alec Waugh, a British novelist and elder brother of Evelyn, noted, “The nomenclature of wine, most of it based on the French, was freely used. There was talk of goût de paille, a musty straw-like flavor, and goût de pierre à fusil, a flinty taste to be found in Chablis; there were words like corsé, meaning full-blooded; velouté (velvety) was a term of recommendation, but fruité (fruity) was not… It is not surprising that many Americans became suspicious of so abstruse and exacting a science. They became shy of serving wine, afraid of doing the wrong thing, preferring to stick to what they knew: cocktails and highballs.”4
World War II brought a fresh round of calamities, affecting the vineyards and territories of Europe and, in the US, diverting labor, materials, and supply away from wine toward more urgent causes. It wasn’t until the postwar boom years that wine connoisseurship began to gain traction in the US, as California went from being a state to a brand, and wine tourism became a legitimate leisure pursuit for both the wealthy and the middle class. The first American wine magazines appeared in the late 1950s, and over the next decade, wine saw a proliferation of buyer’s guides, newsletters, tourist books, and columns.
Among the earliest evangelists for consumers was Leon Adams, an author and journalist who had helped start the California Grape Grower’s League at the end of Prohibition, and later the Wine Institute. In 1958, he published The Commonsense Book of Wine and created a correspondence course for consumers that culminated in earning a certificate. In particular, Adams aimed to simplify wine by demystifying its language. “The nomenclature tangle is so complete that I am certain no person lives who could describe the tastes and colors represented by all of the wine names popular in various parts of the world.”5
Adams claimed that, because winemaking was a European import to the US, “with the art came the language of wine. And the language of wine types in Europe—as in the ancient Near East, where wine was born—is mainly a language of geography, not of flavor.”6 Americans unfamiliar with the concept of terroir and the place-centricity of European wine were encouraged instead to learn the language of flavor in order to personalize the experience of tasting. That way, any wine—perhaps, especially, any American wine—could be experienced and enjoyed without the baggage of territorial or geopolitical associations.
Nonetheless, the market was soon awash in American-grown wines with fanciful names appropriated from European geography. Wine, or at least American wine, was becoming modern, its producers drawing influences and inspiration not only from their own territories and traditions but also those of other cultures. There were wines labeled “port” and “champagne” and “Rhine,” and, to the topic at hand (and perhaps most famously), “burgundy.” In 1964, E & J Gallo Winery, which had been founded by brothers Ernest and Julio in Sonoma, California, just after the repeal of Prohibition, introduced a red wine called Hearty Burgundy. It was Burgundian only in name; a blended wine, it was made from grapes grown in California’s North Coast and Central Valley, principally Petite Sirah, Zinfandel, and Carignan (the blend has always been proprietary). They packaged it in 1.5-liter glass jugs, and it is still sold today, although now in standard magnum bottles that cost about $12. Gallo also introduced a companion white called Mountain Chablis, a blend of grapes (principally Colombard, Chenin Blanc, and, in a modest tip of the hat to the original, Chardonnay), likewise sold in jugs.
As a fanciful name, Hearty Burgundy wasn’t explanatory, it was evocative. The reference leveraged Americans’ vague, indistinct familiarity with France to elevate the wine’s status, essentially arrogating Frenchness for credibility. (Never mind that Burgundy, France, produces some of the world’s most exquisite white wines as well.) Meanwhile, the word “hearty” telegraphed American vigor and strength, a kind of Californian muscularity. French Burgundy did not view itself as hearty; nor robust or inky. Henri Jayer, a producer in the Côte d’Or, once said, “Black is not the color of Burgundy. You must be able to see through a glass of it. The Pinot has a pretty robe, glistening and shimmering like a cat’s eyes, sparkling like a diamond… It must be fine and elegant.”7 So, this new wine married an American ideal of robust individuality with a French ideal of purity and refinement. Notably, in the marriage, this “Hearty” wine took the French surname “Burgundy,” and that signifier soon came to mean a fine red wine that was made in America.
Linguist Adrienne Lehrer has written extensively about wine language and lexicons, and she used the example of the word “Burgundy” to discuss how both the sense and reference of a word will drift through usage. “The original and still predominant reference is for wines from the Burgundy area of France, typically made from certain grapes. Red Burgundies from France contain a significant amount of Pinot Noir. But in California in the last century, it was used for relatively inexpensive red jug wines, had no Pinot Noir, and was aimed at a market whose buyers had little contact with French Burgundy.” That shift in reference didn’t last, she noted. As American wine culture evolved, the meaning of “Burgundy” morphed back again and “has come around to the original meaning of French wine from a specific region, or at least to wine that is of the Burgundy type.”8
Lehrer also pointed out an important distinction between “descriptive” and “evaluative” wine terms. Descriptive terms are used for dimensions of aroma, flavor, and texture: wine’s hedonic attributes. Those are words like fruity, flowery, thin, ripe, green, and sweet. Evaluative terms are value-laden; they make pronouncements about the wine—for example, great, fine, elegant, common, and insipid.9 Europeans tended to use more evaluative terms, while Americans tended to use more descriptive terms and to describe the qualities of the wine in the glass rather than those of the territory of origin.
The 1960s and 1970s saw increasing American interest in world cuisines, and cooks and cookbook authors rose to meet the moment. In 1961, Julia Child published Mastering the Art of French Cooking, and the next year, following the book’s success, she took to television with The French Chef. Also in 1962, Joyce Chen published the Joyce Chen Cook Book. In 1973, Madhur Jaffrey released An Invitation to Indian Cooking and Marcella Hazan published The Classic Italian Cookbook.
American importers sprang up to bring the world’s wines into the country and get them onto the tables of these adventuresome home gastronomes. Robert Haas launched Vineyard Brands in 1971. Kermit Lynch began his import business for French and Italian wines in 1972. Wilson Daniels was founded in 1978 and amassed a portfolio of top estates, including Domaine de la Romanée-Conti. Becky Wasserman, an American expat who lived in Burgundy, began exporting the region’s wines into the US in 1979.
Publications also sprang up to address interest in gastronomy and connoisseurship, and to furnish American consumers with information, tips, and advice. The New York Times inaugurated a wine column in 1972. Key wine magazines were also launched that decade, including Wine Spectator (1976) and The Wine Advocate (1978); Wine Enthusiast began a mail-order business in 1979 and added a magazine in 1988. Such consumer writing aimed to educate, enlighten, encourage exploration, stimulate thirst, and prompt a sale. To do so, it needed to be accessible and readable, friendly, warm, and engaging. And it needed to assume limited prior knowledge of or experience with wine.
It was a watershed moment in wine commentary. Writers responded to the new demands according to their editorial, philosophical, cultural, and aesthetic bents. Some writers, especially those who had been writing about wine for some time, held firm to older prototypes. Others began to explore ways to make wine evaluation and assessment a more rigorous exercise, developing formal lexicons and vocabularies. And a third cohort was playful, aiming to reach audiences’ hearts and minds with inventive language. These approaches followed each other more or less in sequence, one learning from the next, but they weren’t mutually exclusive. Writers also mixed and matched tactics to suit circumstances and moods. However, each style reflected a slightly different perspective about wine and its cultural significance, and especially about the relationship between the taster and the tasted. Let’s explore all three.
The first style: classical or traditionalist
This inherited the sensibility of European and British wine commentary, which attended to wine’s typicity and geography. An evaluative style, it emphasized a wine’s overall character. Many adherents actively derided metaphor and inventive descriptors, and there was limited discussion of flavor except when necessary to call out a singular distinguishing feature of bottle, site, or vintage. Commentary often aimed to personify wine, to make it a living entity with its own history and integrity. The language was spare, formal, and restrained.
Émile Peynaud, a French enologist and author of a seminal book, Le Goût du Vin (The Taste of Wine), from 1980, was a profound classicist. He disliked metaphorical language, believing it drew attention away from the tasted and, wrongly, toward the taster. “I would condemn the empty, showy style of a certain type of modern wine writing. [A]ny writer who talks of wines as ‘funny, amusing, jokey, coquettish, naughty’ (and the list could easily be lengthened) plumbs the depths of the insignificant and gratuitous.”10
Consumers were exposed to some wine lexicons used by professionals, but the lists were spare and formalist. Frank Schoonmaker’s 1964 Encyclopedia of Wine listed 68 tasting terms, with hardly any olfactory words, and only a handful of generalized flavors—for example, bitter, astringent, fruity, flowery, sour. The preponderance was evaluative—such as balanced, coarse, delicate, distinguished, ordinary, harsh, great, elegant, noble, withered.11
Frank Prial, wine columnist for The New York Times from 1972 to 2005, derided what he called “winespeak,” even targeting it directly in multiple columns. “We Americans, not entirely convinced that anything happened before 1930, have little of either history or tradition on which to draw to describe a wine. […] So we’re not erudite. We’re inventive.”12 Prial was a parsimonious writer who focused principally on producers and their throughlines. He might describe wine as “chunky,” or having “bright spicy flavors,” but taste was not his principal concern.13 Although he frequently reported on Pinot Noir wines, from Burgundy, California, and (up-and-coming) Oregon in particular, he rarely described the wine’s aroma and flavor profile. He mentioned wines of a “lighter style” or “richer style,” or those that were “well made and tasty”; he described wines from the Hautes Côtes de Nuits as having “less fruit and much less intensity than the big names just over the hill. But they are good wines”14—“a solid Pinot Noir in the Burgundy style.”15 That was about as elaborate as he ever got.
Terry Robards, Prial’s colleague at The New York Times, actively lamented the ways in which our impoverished taste language drives writers toward metaphor: “An elegant red Burgundy, thus, may suggest violets or lilacs or even mint, while a rich Pomerol produced mostly from the Merlot grape may remind the taster of the smell of fresh road tar.”16 Robards found such analogies profoundly irritating.
Matt Kramer, author of Making Sense of Burgundy, likewise stuck to spare language. “What does Romanée-Conti taste like? Above all, it is spicy. The forcefulness of this is so strong that it can almost seem unnatural.”17 A consumer wondering whether to buy this expensive wine has nothing more to go on than “spicy.” And here’s Jancis Robinson MW, recommending Pinot Noir for Christmas feasts in her column for the Financial Times, December 2001:18
Côte de Beaune Mondes Rondes 1999 Poulleau. Chunky rather than fine cut, but very honest, dense, red Burgundy from a young grower in Volnay.
Nuits-St-Georges 1999 Alain Michelot. Pale, correct, pure, if slightly light. It is already open and enjoyable, though.
Pommard Tavannes 1999 Fernand and Laurent Pillot. Broad, rich nose of violets. Sweet, round, quite evolved on the palate with a long, intense flavor. Good price.
Note her use of honest, chunky, fine cut, correct,and even good price. Robinson’s notes, however brief, reveal a taste for personifying wine and a sense of the critic’s obligation to render judgment, to evaluate. She seemed less inclined to describe its aromas and flavors.
Gerald Asher, wine editor of Gourmet from 1972 to 2002, was likewise a classicist, and here, in an excerpt from his 1990 piece “Corton: The Heart of Burgundy,” we see how this American writer was working in the same voice as his French sources (emphasis mine):
“A Corton wine is male,” says François Faiveley, whose family has long been a proprietor of vineyards there. “It is more vigorous than other red wines of the Côte d’Or.” Philippe Senard of the Domaine Comte Senard agrees. “A young Corton is assertive,” he says. “There’s something violent about it. It’s the Burgundy that gains most from aging.” Nadine de Nicolay, a woman as graceful as her wines, also sees in her Corton wines qualities she referred to as masculine. “Savigny and Pernand are flowery and fruity, but Corton has the darker aromas of the woods—bark and mushrooms,” she said.
From my own experience, I would say that a young Corton is distinctive among Burgundies for its focus and curious impression of raw energy. I suppose that’s the violence Philippe Senard referred to. But when mature, a well-made Corton of good vintage is as sumptuous as it is possible for a wine to be.
Senard also finds a savage quality in wine from Renardes. “It makes one think of game, of fur,” he told me. “Each site imposes clear characteristics of its own. A Perrières, just as the name suggests, gives a reticent, stony impression. The wines of Bressandes are the most refined of Corton, but they are very muscular, too. Their combination of strength and grace always puts me in mind of a dancer. Wines of Combes are robust, at first even rude, rustic. But it’s the wines of the Clos du Roi that, for me, most typically represent what a Corton should be. They have attack, power, and—if you like—a certain majesty.”19
Note, in particular, how few flavor descriptions appear in these passages and how these French producers used terms we might normally apply to fellow humans. Such personification of the wine rendered it a living entity, a peer to whom one can relate, even a friend with whom one may converse. The wine was a character with enduring attributes, plus qualities that shift according to mood and weather (in the second case quite literally). The wine was not esoteric or rarified. The wine wasn’t even a thing. It was a neighbor.
The second style: analytical and scientific
This style arose in the 1970s as academics and credentialing bodies began to formulate responses to what they viewed as imprecision in wine commentary. They were equally skeptical of the older, classical forms and the newer, more expressive content. They held that an understanding of wine could be grasped through formalized tasting protocols, then communicated with standardized language. They developed evaluative systems posited as objective methods to assess wine’s qualities. It was a descriptive style, reliant on analogy to characterize wine’s olfactory and hedonic properties. While designed for professionals and judges, the systems, or some portions thereof, inevitably found their way into consumer media.
In 1976, Maynard Amerine, a professor at UC Davis since 1935, published, with colleague Edward Roessler, Wines: Their Sensory Evaluation, on their work to standardize wine language. The book was, notably, aimed at the connoisseur as well as the professional. Their project reacted against what they viewed as the “romanticism” of contemporary wine discourse. The approach emphasized wine’s texture, structure, shape, and overall impact. It suggested only a few flavor analogies and, in particular, directly cautioned against the use of more than 100 adjectives (including nutty, meaty, perfumed, silky, and smoky). Amerine and Roessler called theirs a “classic approach,” which would yield “consistent, defensible results.”20 It was classical in that it advocated spare language, but it was new in emphasizing objectivity over subjectivity.
In 1974, after Amerine retired, Ann Noble joined the faculty at UC Davis. A sensory researcher in the department of enology and viticulture, Noble was likewise frustrated by the imprecision of contemporary wine tasting notes and how these terms telegraphed meaning to consumers (or didn’t). Interviewed in 2014, she recalled that at that time, “wine experts (writers, winemakers, and sommeliers, for instance) would describe wines with words such as ‘harmonious, elegant, round, and balanced.’ I felt these nonspecific terms created an unnecessary mystique around wine. Consumers would feel intimidated. They had no idea how to identify a good wine or a wine they liked or if a wine they liked was in fact good.”21
Noble set about to develop a standardized taxonomy of terms that “were analytical and free of hedonic or value-judgment connotations.”22 Her approach diverged from her colleagues’ earlier work in its focus on wine’s aromatic properties. She used chemical and analytical sensory techniques to develop a three-tiered system of aroma descriptors. At the top level were broad terms like fruity, floral, and earthy, which then branched into secondary and tertiary terms. For example:
Fruity (1st) — Citrus (2nd) — Grapefruit, Lemon, Orange (3rd)
Chemical (1st) — Pungent (2nd) — Ethyl acetate, Acetic acid, Ethanol, Sulfur dioxide (3rd)
Floral (1st) — Floral (2nd) — Terpene, Linalool, Jasmine, Rose, Violet, Geranium (3rd)
Noble chose to present her three-tiered system as a wheel, with the primary qualities at the center and the most specific descriptors arrayed around the outside. Some of these were chemical smells that could be directly detected by a human sensorium (ethyl acetate), but others were analogous (rose). Noble published the Aroma Wheel in preliminary form in 1984, and she continued to refine the system, issuing an update in 1987 that removed redundancies, added terms, and reorganized categories. The new version included many more descriptive third-tier terms (such as violet, blackcurrant/cassis, blackberry, hazelnut, green bean). The paper also discussed how the reference materials were produced—for example, green bean was the aroma when brine from a can of green beans was added to a neutral base wine.23
Noble’s final wheel contained 83 descriptive terms. It was a taxonomy and lexicon reliant on analogy. If one were to use the Aroma Wheel to describe a Burgundian Pinot Noir, one might arrive at the following:
Fruity — Berry — Raspberry
Fruity — Tree Fruit — Cherry
Woody — Resinous — Oak
Spicy — Spicy — Clove
Floral — Floral — Violet
Earthy — Earthy — Mushroom, Dusty
The wheel encouraged rigorous analysis, precision, and accuracy, but its reliance on flavor analogies meant that it was fundamentally a descriptive strategy. It called upon the taster to evaluate their hedonic impressions, a departure from the traditionalist evaluative strategy that allowed broad character strokes. This system, and all of the wine lexicons that followed, regarded wine as an object whose aesthetic truths could be evaluated and described objectively, provided the framework was rigorously followed. There is no clove in Pinot Noir; the wine smells like clove. There is no raspberry in Pinot Noir, the wine tastes like raspberry. The wine is objectified in relation to other objects.
In 1975, about the time Noble was beginning her work at UC Davis, linguist Adrienne Lehrer published her first paper on her research about wine and conversation, which highlighted the shift toward hedonic tasting notes. “An important change in wine descriptions in the last 30 years is the emphasis on aroma,” she wrote, adding that “taste is considered a highly personal experience; and by talking about a wine, people can somehow objectify the experience, thus sharing it more than just by drinking together. In talking about how a wine tastes, they can try to make sure that they are experiencing the same thing” [emphasis mine].24 In other words, how a wine tastes has become more important than what a wine is like.
The Wine and Spirit Education Trust (WSET) launched in the UK in 1969 and soon expanded to other countries, entering the US in 1994. The WSET still trains new wine professionals and provides the path to the Master of Wine credential. To support pedagogy, it developed a proprietary tasting system called the Systematic Approach to Tasting (SAT). It breaks the evaluation of wine into an assessment of Appearance, Nose, Palate, and Conclusion. For direct palate impressions (of sweetness, acidity, tannin, alcohol, body, and so on), students are instructed to use a generalized value scale: low, medium-minus, medium, medium-plus, and high. For primary, secondary, and tertiary aromas and flavors, it provides a lexicon of terms, which, at Level 4, contains about 100 fruits, flowers, herbs, spices, baked goods, and a few aromatic but inedible items.25
Using the WSET Level 4 grid, a taster might describe a Corton Burgundy this way:
Clear medium ruby with garnet. Aromatically medium-plus intensity with primary aromas of violet, redcurrant, and red cherry, flavors of red cherry and clove, and tertiary notes of mushroom. Very good overall quality and suitable for aging.
It’s a dry style, relying on aroma and flavor analogy. The WSET provides a disclaimer to students at the foot of the grid, noting that it is designed to be a prompt, and memorization isn’t required to pass the test: “The examiners will accept other descriptors so long as they are accurate,” meaning, presumably, a flavor analogy they expect—for example, they might accept boysenberry for a Corton, but not cucumber. And they almost certainly would not accept graceful, wild, savage, reticent, stony, rude, robust, rustic, or violent, terms the Corton producers themselves once used.
The WSET form proliferated as people entering the wine trade took courses and trained using the SAT. Below is an example recent tasting note by American writer Samantha Cole-Johnson, a reviewer for Jancisrobinson.com. It’s from a round-up of under-$30 Pinot Noirs from Oregon, and this wine is from Winter’s Hill:
“Pale ruby in colour. Really ripe red cherry and red plum on the nose. Smells like cinnamon graham crackers. Ripe and viscous on the palate with red fruit, medium grippy tannin, medium acid and a medium-plus finish. They’ve done quite well with this, but it’s certainly for New World wine lovers—very fruit- and oak-forward.” (SCJ) 13.7% Drink 2022–2026”26
Cole-Johnson holds the WSET Diploma and has completed Stage 1 of the MW program. Her brief tasting notes follow some of the lexical conventions of the WSET; this is her lingua franca after all. The note is emblematic of the structured, systematic style, readably brief and populated by a few colorful analogies. It does, however, assume some familiarity with the professional terms of art, for example medium, medium-plus, -forward, and New World. This systematic approach, now decades old, is prevalent across media so would not be novel for avid readers of wine commentary. But it’s not especially descriptive or engaging to those new to the category.
As we’ve seen, the WSET and Aroma Wheel were heavily analogous, populated with (mostly) organic materials that served as references for the aromas and flavors the taster sensed in the wine. Problematically, the lexicons, at least originally, required familiarity with these reference flavors to pass exams. When Tinashe Nyamudoka, a Zimbabwean sommelier and winemaker, first began to study wine, he had to devise a reference framework using his own analogies. “In my school, in my tasting exams, I had made a whole parallel vocabulary. So I had notes of the Zimbabwean fruits I grew up tasting. For instance, I would say, if I smell hute, which is a water berry—you find it mostly along the rivers in Zimbabwe—I used to associate it with Pinot Noir. So if I smell the water berry, I’ll say, ‘Okay, this is a Pinot Noir.’”27
The third style, or perhaps third wave: expressive
Critics took liberties, developing their individual voices and styles and, organically, their own lexicons and vocabularies. They often appropriated terms and descriptive motifs from other writers and from the culture at large. They became, in effect, poets of wine.
Robert M Parker Jr, a lawyer from Maryland, had no formal training in wine when he launched his newsletter, The Wine Advocate, in 1978. In fact, Parker was resolutely a wine industry outsider who sought to bring opinions about wines to consumers free of commercial bias. His reviews spoke directly to fellow wine lovers eager for buying advice. Parker wrote in a lavishly descriptive style. Here’s an example from his Wine Buyer’s Guide (1989 edition) related to the 1985 Domaine de la Romanée-Conti La Tâche and Grand Cru wines:
“The La Tâche offers surreal and celestial aromas of Oriental spices and flowers, masses of ripe fruit, scents of truffles, dazzling concentration, tremendous breadth of flavor, exquisite length, and 20 or more years of cellaring potential. Tasting the Romanée-Conti just after I had tasted the La Tâche, I thought the former would not be as good, but it is utterly mind-blowing. The heady, intoxicating bouquet delivered penetrating and sublime aromas that were even more intense than those of the La Tâche. On the palate, there is a veritable abundance of earthy and heavenly delights. Needless to say, it is very rich, very opulent, and very concentrated. Red Burgundy—and red wine in general—does not get any better than this.”28
Parker’s prose was heavily descriptive and highly inventive, with clear emphasis on the wine’s olfactory and flavor sensibilities. There are noun analogies (spices, flowers, truffles), but the writing is animated more vividly by means of adjectives and adverbs: penetrating, sublime, opulent, concentrated, dazzling, exquisite. The use of such qualifiers was meant to amplify the expression, and while it did enliven the text, making the prose itself seem more opulent and luscious in the mouth, its overuse has an ironic numbing effect. Even when criticizing a wine, Parker did not shift away from this style. Here he is that same year writing about California Pinot Noir:
“Since it is rarely good, the Pinot Noir characteristics most often encountered are washed-out vegetal, tomato-scented fruit, cooked prune, raisin flavors, and an imbalanced feel on the palate.”29
Parker’s writing is emblematic of a shift in the wine narrative, specifically in what, or who, plays the leading role. Older forms put the wine into the center of the frame, remarking on its character and typicity. The Burgundian producers didn’t need to describe the flavor of the wine because it was an established character, a type, varying mostly according to place, vintage, and aging. They knew what the wine was like. Meanwhile, those new to wine, especially consumers who lacked a historical, geographic, and traditionalist reference frame, needed something to grasp onto as they dragged themselves toward understanding—whether of a Corton or a Hearty Burgundy. A consumer might ask, “What does the wine taste like?” When the answer was an analogy (cherries, oak), the consumer might make a connection. When the answer was an analogy decorated with lavish metaphor, they might make a purchase.
The High Baroque voice first popularized in the 1980s and 1990s was swiftly emulated by marketers, and it remains the dominant style. The following five examples describe the 2021 Thea’s Selection Pinot Noir from Lemelson Vineyards, a producer in the Willamette Valley in Oregon. Which of the following five tasting notes was written by the winery, and which were written by critics?
A pronounced saline note similar to the lining of a freshly shucked oyster mixes with notes of blackberries and marshmallows toasted over a smoky campfire. Bracing acidity and velvety tannins frame flavors like raspberry, smoked almonds, and candied rose petals.
Aromas of ripe red cherry, plum, black tea, and a hint of lavender. Medium-bodied with fine, silky tannins. Bright acidity articulates the red fruit and berries with clarity and drive. Fresh cream at the finish. A total delight.
The nose is inviting and earthy with black cherry, blackcurrant, and plum fruit that is nuanced by subtle notes of black tea, chocolate, mushroom, and lavender. This wine is rich and supple with silky tannins and a juicy core which transitions into a long finish that leaves the taste of brambly fruit on the palate.
A smoky blend of wild herbs, ground ginger, and crushed raspberries smolders up from the 2021 Pinot Noir Thea’s Selection. It’s softly textured with cooling minerality and pure red berry fruits underscored by saline minerals. Zesty acidity adds a liveliness through the finish as the 2021 tapers off long and spicy yet only lightly tannic.
Refined and structured, offering pinpoint black cherry, savory spice, and black tea flavors that build tension and tannins on the finish. Drink now through 2029.
Answers: 1. Wine Enthusiast; 2. James Suckling; 3. Lemelson Vineyards30; 4. Vinous; 5. Wine Spectator31
The notes are nearly indistinguishable, alike in style but not in substance. Some writers got smoke, others wild herbs, there’s some agreement on tea and salt and cherry, although one person’s red cherry was another’s black. Some of the descriptions are wildly inventive: marshmallows toasted over a smoky campfire, freshly shucked oysters… A consumer wondering “What does this wine taste like?” is left with a bewildering grab-bag of analogies that seem to contradict one another, ironically only serving to underscore the subjectivity of the tasting exercise.
The poetic style did sell wine. Many wine review publications make their tasting databases available to statisticians and modelers to support their academic research. Linguist Kevin W Capehart, of California State, Fresno, building on work by researcher Coco Krumme, of MIT, evaluated a Wine Enthusiast dataset of 120,000 reviews of wines from $5 to $200. He found that tasting notes using words like bright, fresh, pink, juicy, pizza, and tasty were associated with less expensive wines, while notes with words like intense, velvety, boysenberry, old, tobacco, truffle, steak, and vintage were associated with pricier wines. Tasting notes for cheaper wines were also shorter overall.32 The existence of “expensive” and “cheap” wine words makes intuitive sense to anyone who has been following along for the past few decades. One could hardly imagine Robert Parker describing the Romanée-Conti La Tâche as “tasty, good for pizza.”
But we do find, in some contemporary commentators, a nod to the older forms and norms. Robert Parker retired from his magazine in 2019. The current editor-in-chief is William Kelley, a British writer with a DPhil in history from Oxford University, where, during his tenure, he oversaw the Wine Circle. After receiving his degree, he was Burgundy reviewer for Decanter magazine and did a stage in California and Burgundy before joining The Wine Advocate in 2017. Kelley now lives and makes wine in the Côte d’Or, and is the magazine’s reviewer of Burgundy, Champagne, Madeira, and English sparkling wine.
How does he describe Romanée-Conti Grand Cru? Here are his notes on the 2015, an extraordinarily good vintage in Burgundy. His review appeared in 2018 alongside a perfect 100-point score. (Incidentally, the price on release was $4,160 per bottle; the current average global price is about $30,000.)
The 2015 Romanée-Conti Grand Cru is one of the pinnacles of this great red Burgundy vintage, opening in the glass to reveal a bouquet of kaleidoscopic complexity, notes of raspberry and red plum mingling with rose petal, peony, blood orange, and spice. On the palate, the wine is silky, medium- to full-bodied and stunningly complete, its supremely elegant tannins entirely cloaked in pristinely delicate red fruit. Despite its incredible concentration and persistence, this Romanée-Conti is utterly weightless, and its effortless harmony and unremitting finish preclude any argument about its benchmark quality.33
Kelley’s note is quieter, more restrained than Robert Parker’s writing about this wine. He uses analogous terms (raspberry, rose petal, peony, blood orange) and modifiers (kaleidoscopic, effortless, unremitting), plus there are glimmers of the evaluative characterization (stunningly complete, pristinely delicate, elegant). He uses some of the WSET terminology (medium- to full-bodied). His style could be described as inventive but tilting toward postmodernism, a commingling of classicist, scientific, and personal perspectives.
Although the inventive mode seems, at least superficially, like a departure from the analytical—the former permissive and expansive, the latter strict and narrowing—both emphasize olfactory and flavor reference points over the wine’s context, culture, and history. As economist Andrew James has noted, “tasting note writers in magazines today betray the influence of Parker and Noble in their reliance upon precise aroma descriptors to explain the individual components in the tasting experience. Before wine magazines came into vogue, the descriptions tended to focus on simplicity, clarity, and the appreciation of wine as a holistic entity.”34 Both represented a new way forward, but it’s clear something was left behind in the process.
James wonders whether clarity may be served by rolling back the clock: “Given the subjectivity of our evaluation of aromas, instead of talking about the strawberries and blackcurrants we find in our Pinot Noir, perhaps we should stay on the inner circle of Noble’s wine wheel and limit ourselves to general remarks on red fruit.”35 But that seems like an impoverished stance. A more fully realized approach would grant permission to a writer to modulate their vocabularies, grammar, and syntax to express their personal style while also attending to the wine’s classical declarations, as well as its hedonic and affective impact.
Jermaine Stone, an American wine educator, producer, and impresario, is passionate about both wine and popular music and combines them artfully in his work. He has a particular love of Burgundy (he calls himself “the lost son of Burgundy”) and has covered Pinot Noir extensively on his YouTube channel.36 He has met with Pinot Noir wine producers in their vineyards and cellars, taking it from the Bronx to Burgundy. He filmed in Burgundy with Jeremy Seysses, of Domaine Dujac, for a pairing of Burgundy wines with grilled cheese sandwiches prepared by a Michelin-starred chef.37 He filmed in New York with Canadian wine editor Gurvinder Bhatia for a pairing of German Pinot Noir with Jamaican beef patties.38 Stone regularly pairs wine with hip-hop music; in one video, he considers a music pairing for Fat Bastard Pinot Noir. Sampling the wine, he says: “Elegant, smooth… this one’s got some weight to it. Juicy cherry, soft spice, and a little earthy, too. All right, it’s got to be a track that’s got some layers but still hits smooth every time. Ah! Missy. ‘Sock It 2 Me.’ That bounce, the playfulness. Smooth, but got an edge, just like this Pinot. I feel like there’s definitely some rebellious energy here.”39
Stone nods to prototypes while inventing new expressions. He is evaluative, descriptive, and inventive. It’s through holistic gestures like these that Pinot Noir, and wine itself, can become fully postmodern. ▉
This paper was prepared for the Pinot Noir and Identity Symposium, July 2025, Oxford University.
