Do you feel confused when wine-drinkers around you praise the "oaky clove with a berry finish" that you only know as red?
Help is at hand. You too can become a wine bluffer extraordinaire with the help of a "wine aroma wheel" that will help you pronounce sagely about nose, taste and finish.
The goal of Prof Ann Noble of the University of California, Davis, is to burst wine pomposity. "It is making a caste system. It is not how you teach people," she said during a session on the Semantics of Talking about Taste. She decries the "pretension and posturing" often found in overblown descriptions of how a wine tastes or smells. It is necessary, though, to have some common wine vocabulary, she believes, which can be achieved through a standard terminology.
Her wheel contains dozens of the most frequently used wine words, such as vanilla, butter, honey, clove and, believe it or not, wet dog. It shows concentric rings with the inner circle providing the most basic terms and the middle and outer rings providing sub-divisions. Prof Noble has created recipes which provide a selection of representative smells. Each includes a wine chosen for having a nondescript smell. You get "butter" by adding to white a drop of butter extract; asparagus is achieved with white and several drops of brine from tinned asparagus; strawberry is made using red and one to three tablespoons of old jam, not fresh.
These will give representative smells to connect with the terms, she says. With a bit of training, each smell will become distinct and equate to a particular taste. More insights to the vocabulary of wine were provided by Dr Adrienne Lehrer of the University of Arizona who wrote a book on the subject in 1983. She is more sympathetic about the precious language of wine-tasting because it aids communication.
More about the wine wheel is available at Prof Noble's website http://wineserver.ucdavis.edu/ acnoble/home.html