Understanding Winespeak: What Are The Wine Media Talking About?

James Thurber’s cartoon in The New Yorker of a wine snob saying to his dinner guests,“It’s a naïve domestic burgundy, but I think you’ll be amused by its presumption” is a classic put-down of wine puffery, as is the parody of wine talk in Evelyn Waugh’s “Brideshead Revisited” when two drunken characters describe various bottlings as “a little, shy wine like a gazelle. . . . Like a leprechaun. . . . Dappled, in a tapestry meadow” and “like the last unicorn.”

As the business of wine has become more serious, thereby demanding more serious observations, the verbiage of less elegant writers on wine is today more along the lines of what sounds like a chemical breakdown: “Bret in the nose, incomplete malolactic fermentation, a slight taste of graphite, a scent of botrytis, and enough vanillin to suggest overuse of new French barriques.”
If you love wine but haven’t the foggiest notion of what any of that means, you are probably not a true wine geek if you are less interested in the science of viniculture than what a wine actually tastes like. Of course, anyone can simply make up blather to describe the taste of wine as “cinnamon, Meyer lemon, papaya, Monte Cristo No. 2 with Dominican wrapping, cat’s pee, and a hint of Sicilian blood orange.” But there are a few Winespeak terms you might want to become familiar with for the next time a wine snob tries to lord it over you.

Legs—Also, “wine tears.” The ring of wine near the top of the glass whose liquid creates tear-like droplets caused by a high alcohol content. Or, more colloquially, those same droplets caused by a thick, sweet wine.

Grip—A vague term suggesting that a sip of wine lingers on the palate rather than just slip away.

botrytis cinerea—A fungus on grape skins that rots the grapes but concentrates the sugars and acids to make a very sweet but balanced wine like French Sauternes or German trockenbeerenlause. In grateful homage to this fungus, it is called the “Noble Rot.”

Phylloxera—A tiny aphid that can devastate vineyards by attacking grape vine roots. From the 1860s on, the bug killed off 6.2 million acres of vineyards in France alone, and was believed to come from the U.S. on other imported plants. Europe’s wine industry was only saved after graftings of resistant American vines were made in the vineyards. An infestation also hit California vineyards in the 1980s.

brettanomyces—Or, simply, “bret.” A chemical term for an unwanted yeast whose volatile compounds can cause wines to have a barnyard or wet blanket smell. Bret can live on many surfaces within a winery and is treated with sulfur dioxide.

Brix—A scale used to determine the must weight or sugar content in grapes, determined by the numbers of sugar grams or per 100 grams water or as the percentage of content. The number can provide winemakers of what the eventual alcohol may be in the finished wine. One degree Brix equals 18 grams per liter of sugar.