Wine is dead: how language misleads our understanding

Image credit: Linnaea Mallette

Wine is not a living thing. The fact that the flavour and aroma of wine changes with time is in fact caused by decay, and eventually that decay will lead to decrepitude - but even then, a wine is not strictly dead (because that infers that life was formerly present).

However, the language of wine is rarely meant literally. Wine is commonly described as a living thing in the figurative sense, implying that it grows and changes in the bottle. Stages of human life such as adolescent, juvenile or even geriatric are sometimes applied to wine. Such terms can be useful shorthand, especially among wine lovers who are already accustomed to these descriptors.

It would be far less useful to describe a wine as inanimate, even though that might be a more technically accurate description.

Communicating about wine frequently presents these challenges because we are trying to describe sensory concepts by using comparisons, analogies, metaphors and other linguistic tropes. (See this recent conversation between Jamie Goode and Steve Daniel for more thoughts on the subject, focused on the word minerality).

Furthermore, most wine communication tends to be emphasise the positive, leading to emotive or hyperbolic words such as heartbreak, exquisite or triumphant. Scientific descriptions of flavour compounds or acidity measurements are rarely a useful way of describing wine because they are too arcane.

However, some turns of phrase remain too open to misinterpretation, and describing wine as alive is one of them. Artistic licence is an important part of effective communication, and subjectivity is unavoidable in wine, but I would argue against anything that is so potentially misleading.