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Badmouthing wine critics is a parlor game anyone can play. Why not? The first guy who talked about “legs” put a Mark of Cain on the rest of us for all time. Ever since then, we critic types have been walking around with a big target on our butts that says “Kick here.”
I’ve learned to laugh at it and roll with the punches, but every once in a while somebody says something snarky about me and my colleagues that makes me want to defend our occupation of wine criticism. This time around, it’s a columnist for the Los Angeles Times, Joel Stein. Now, I don’t know Joel, and he didn’t mention me, or anyone else for that matter, although he did quote Gary Vaynerchuk, who name-dropped Jancis Robinson, Spectator and Parker.
Joel seems to cover the culture beat at the Times. His online biography says he’s appeared on Comedy Central’s “Reel Comedy” and E! Entertainment’s “101 Hottest Hot Hotties’ Hotness,” so I guess we should take him seriously.
The object of Joel’s ire (I hope he doesn’t mind my calling him by his first name) is winespeak. Like I said, this is always an easy one for a columnist to knock, especially one who’s on deadline and can’t come up with anything more germane.
Joel’s hard-hitting column gets right to the point. He likens people who talk about “notes of cherries, tobacco and rose petals” to “a whole lot of jackass. The language of sommeliers, winemakers, sellers and writers,” he goes on, “has devolved into nothing besides a long list of obscure smells that tells me nothing.”
Well, hold on a gosh-darned micro-minuto here. As one who’s used “cherries, tobacco and rose petals” to describe more than one wine over the years, I feel as if the Hand of Destiny has tapped me on the shoulder as the Poster Boy to stand up and defend us over-worked, underpaid, and too-often mocked Wine Writers!
Here are the hard, brutal facts, my friends. Wines really do have very complex aromas and flavors of flowers, herbs and fruits, and other things as well: spices, minerals, animals, vegetables, and organic chemicals. The reason for this is that there are thousands of different kinds of molecules in wine, and many of those molecules are found in flowers, herbs, fruits, etc.
Now, Joel says he doesn’t care about these aroma and flavors descriptors (although, obviously, a lot of people do). He says, “I want to know if a wine is rough, balanced, acidic, sweet, simple, tannic, soft, hot with alcohol, mineraly [sic], watery or has a long finish.” Well, the better critics I know (and I know many of them in the U.S.) do tell their readers these things, as a matter of routine. A critic can say a wine has notes of cherries, and also say it’s rough, or balanced, or tannic, or hot, or whatever. No mutual exclusion there!
Joel also quotes Vaynerchuk saying this about critics: “[T]here’s a lot of people who suck at communicating…Nobody has guts.” Well, I’ll drop the names of some wine critic friends of mine who have guts and are damned good communicators. Alan Goldfarb. Dan Berger. Steve Pitcher. Eric Asimov. Jim Gordon. Jim Laube. Karen MacNeil. Kathy Marks Hardesty. Wilfred Wong. Laurie Daniel. Alder Yarrow. Harvey Steiman. My colleagues at Wine Enthusiast: Roger Voss, Monica Larner, Paul Gregutt, Michael Schachner and Joe Czerwinski. And, ahem, me. I could go on and on. Maybe Joel Stein is a wine critic manqué. He wouldn’t be the first.
I think Joel just woke up on the wrong side of bed and was feeling a little meow. I forgive him. Next time I’m tasting a great Pinot Noir with notes of cherries, tobacco and rose petals — and maybe even hints of licorice, mocha and green tea — I’ll lift a glass to Joel. L’Chaim!
P.S. Welcome to my new blog here at Wine Enthusiast’s Unreserved.
Filed under: Wine Writing, Commentary
2 Responses to “A Column with Notes of Obscure Snarkiness”
Please Wait
June 25th, 2008 at 12:54:20 PM
“Keeping Up With the Steins” was a not-bad movie starring Jeremy Piven of “Entourage,” but I say you’ve blown right by this Stein, who was obviously going for a cheap rip with a column on something he knows nothing about. How many Pulitzers does this Stein dude have anyway?
November 14th, 2008 at 3:21:13 PM
A few years ago I ran into Bob Thompson in the post office and in catching up on one another I asked him what he had been writing. He told me he had given up writing about wine, ” I was sitting there, for the thousandth time trying to come up with a description for a Cabernet and I just said hell with it, I quit.”
I side with Stein, though I think he is trying hard without the necessary wit to be a P.J. O’rourke. If you actually look at the aroma compounds and the way they interact to create an olfactory impression you cannot help but see the sillyness in some wine descriptions. For example there are at least 67 aroma compounds - esters, aldehydes and terpenes that create a sensation we know as the smell of an orange. We don’t recognize the components individually and they don’t reverberate to smell like lemon one minute and then to a quince, then to an old shoe, and then back to orange. We sense the combination of the aroma compounds as one thing- an orange. With a slight modification to the volatile compound set it might more like tangerine or like an overipe orange, but it never smells like an orange one minute, a tangerine the next, and an overipe orange a moment later.
Aroma in wine is the same. There are hundreds of volatiles that combine to create an aroma impression. A wine does not resemble tobacco one minute and then smell like an orange the next and then turn to cherry. that is because tobacco is one profile of volatiles, cherry is a completely different set, and orange is a third and completely different set. A wine presents one profile of volatiles and it smells like one something to everyone…and writers struggle to get that something down on paper to describe it. And often, what they come up with is a ridiculous grab bag - a description that no wine has every really resembled or ever could.