The problem with wine is not how it is made, or drunk, but how it is presented between the making and the drinking. The bigger problem, of course, is the fact that I always find so much wrong with the world of wine (or world in general) but please reader, for a minute, focus.

Let's face it. We will never know enough about wines. We prefer to leave that whole tasting and judging bit to those boys who like to go by the name of wine writers. The rest of us actually have a life. This is perhaps where we are going wrong. Delegation has its downside and leaving things up to people who rarely step outside or get invited to the really cool parties, means that we have a lot of boring unimaginative stuff to sift and work our way through before we can extract anything useful, or shareable in public.

They write notes as if filing a first-hand forensics report from a disturbing crime scene. What I would like to get from a tasting note is an introduction to a bella of a bottle, general information I could get through an exchange that could transpire over dinner. Instead, what we get from these toffee-nosed vinos is the tasting note equivalent of a cavity search with an anal probe the size of a pig's knuckles!

Frank Sullivan's creation, (the cliché expert) Mr. Arbuthnot was interviewed by Frank Prial about the clichés in wine tasting terms and the result was something that I too have felt strongly and similarly about for quite some time now. People who write the tasting notes that are unleashed upon us unsuspecting consumers are not the kind that evoke excitement. The only thing you can tell from them is that the writer was dropped on his/her head often by the parenting adult.

I was once asked by a friend how I managed to taste so many wines in a single seating and then, how did I manage to write different tasting notes that could later help me distinguish one wine from another? I shared my secret with her and this is what I told her. "I think of each wine as a person. So I use ‘people' adjectives to describe wine. That way they all have their marked personality and character traits and I never end up confusing them with each other. Thus, some wines are suave, like George Clooney and some, forward, like Muhammad Ali." The girl still left me but that was for entirely different reasons. Obviously kinky doesn't mean the same on every continent.

Anyhoos, the problem looms. People who have managed to imbibe a lot of the good stuff think that there wouldn't be enough for them if they let us in on the really useful words. Why is ‘yummy' good for home-made macaroni & cheese but not for 1982 Bordeaux? Does the value of a good cult Californian Cabernet deteriorate if I profess to finding it ‘bloody good!'? How about describing those critter-labelled Aussie cabs as the equivalent of a Hank Williams country crooner which you can enjoy but never with other male company. And to equate a good, solid, slightly aged Pinot with some Miles Davis ‘Kind of Blue' should only come naturally. Any adjective, as long as it holds in the gathering we are in, qualifies. That way you not only impress with your wine woo-ha but also with your vast knowledge on their field of comfortable cognisance.

I think we need to do with tasting notes what air-guitaring has done with rock music: by discounting for technique, it has made the process pure unadulterated fun. Best yet, anybody can join in, that is, anybody drunk enough to be able to forget the meaning (and implications) of the term ‘public self-humiliation'. But it is fun nonetheless. Wine, for all its tastes, aromas and nuances, is sadly, not fun. Not fun enough anyway.

And then we wonder why people don't drink the stuff. Simply, because it is stuffy or at least made to sound so by the stuffier people who write the stuffiest tasting notes. Maybe it's time we told them to go get st.... never mind, before my online editor panics!

Back to the girl with whom I shared my secret, a few months later she mailed me. She said that she had started doing the same (using common adjectives to describe wines) and the whole world of wines had becomes much easier to harness. In fact, she continued, she had gone a step further and started using wine terms to describe people. !?? Maybe, in retrospect, I should be thankful to God. Of all reasons, to be dumped because of my slightly predominant tannic after-taste may be too much to cope with, even for me.

Just,
Magan

www.thewinesocietyofindia.com