Wine-Speak Descriptions of wine in catalogs and ads di Manuela Violoni

To get through to the consumer, you have to speak his language. Sensorial analysis makes this possible and with good results.

Data: Tasters Study Center, Serena Gusmeri
Wine and descriptions: two worlds apart?
People involved in communications know that what's said or written can serve many purposes: not just to inform but also to convince, impress, entice or even just maintain contact. The same holds true for wine communications.
From the consumer or technical viewpoint of sensorial analysis, we might think that wine descriptions should be an aid to choosing a wine. In practice, many descriptions that we find in catalogs, on labels, in advertisements and even in guides respond to other needs of the winemaker: creating an aura of nobility and glamour around the product, legitimizing its place on the Olympus of great wines-that is, creating a world with its own poetics. But few of them respond to the consumer's need for orientation and the result, especially for the inexpert, is so discouraging that they may come to feel that, "since I understand so little, why should I shell out for an expensive bottle?"

Testing-ground descriptions
A series of tests conducted by the Tasters Study Center, starting in 2004, was concerned with the intelligibility of the descriptions found in wine guides and catalogs. The starting premise was that, in addition to being convincing and appealing, a sensorial description has to:
1. Truly reflect perceptions of the wine in question, otherwise it's a flight of fancy.
2. Enable the reader to effectively distinguish between two different wines.
In the two initial tests of combinations, two panels of judges were used, neither packed with experts in the wine sector but individuals trained in sensory analysis and thus to recognizing sensations and aromas and to describing them in words. The test mechanism was simple: matching a set of wines presented for a blind tasting with corresponding descriptions given in a file. The first test used six descriptions taken from winery catalogs, while in the second four texts were taken from some of the top Italian wine guides. The result: hit or miss guessing would have been easier than following the descriptions. Given a 17% probability of randomly choosing the right, the right choices from the catalogs were 9%; similarly, from the Luca Maroni guide the right answers were 20% out of a 25% probability rate, and from the AIS guide the total was 13% out of a probable 40%. The regularity of these figures is significant.

Why don't ad and catalog descriptions grab us?
There are two possible reasons. The first is prevalent in the catalogs, the second in the guides.
Forced to follow the models-or, better, the commonplaces-of excellence, the descriptions have gradually become all alike. And so, for the six red wines considered, four of the six are "deep ruby red," four of the six have "intense aromas" and four of the six are "deeply scented with red fruit". But are wines really all alike? These descriptions deny the product a legitimate and necessary differentiation.
We quote verbatim an expression used in one of the test descriptions: "a rotund fluffy sweetness of balsamic milk, inviting as a mint-frosted currant candy".
How can a wine thus described exist? Poetic descriptions may charm and attract but are often hard to relate to the average person's experience of wine. They are too vague from the technical standpoint and at the same time too lyrical and distant from everyday language. They arouse curiosity but at the same time intimidate, creating a feeling of being excluded, of not belonging to a world that speaks its own language:
Wine-speak.

In other words, consumers are trying to cope with wine jargon.
Language has the power to unite people or divide them. Just as languages divide humanity into nations, so jargon has the power to create cliques, excluding everyone who doesn't speak the lingo. This is as true for punks as it is for the medical profession and for those involved in wine on various levels, whether experts or not.
And here we come to the crux of the matter: the vocabulary used for wine.
In advertising, in catalogs and on labels, in other words, when the purpose is to communicate in order to sell, is it useful to use technical jargon and the wine world's codified metaphors?
Many of those interviewed in the following test declared their dislike of individuals who, glass in hand, rattle off sophisticated wine phrases on TV. They make the average consumer feel excluded, ignorant, or, in the worst cases, even duped, to the point of thinking "it's all a bunch of hooey to entice me to buy."
And yet wine vocabulary is a problem that must be dealt with even in a media society. Because there are many ways of talking about the wine world-photos, films, landscapes and people-but when you come down to the real point of what a given wine tastes like, there are only two ways to find out: tasting it or trying to describe it.

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