Translation and wine tasting shorthand

This is a short piece I wrote for a weekly note on my professional site.

I remembered it because of a reader's letter on tasting terminology in Decanter Sept 2012 (Ask Decanter p102). Gillian Hill wanted to know what 'lift' or 'lifted' and 'flabby' meant in relation to wine tasting, and I was put in mind of the sort of sensory shorthand we use to describe wine.


This week, a few thoughts from the world of wine description.

We often tend to find the same descriptors being used again and again in wine tasting notes. The terms used are often related to the smell and taste of fruits, flowers, spices and other aromas which the experienced taster (or more accurately perhaps, smeller) may be able to detect in the wine being tasted.

The WSET (Wine & Spirit Education Trust) Systematic Approach to tasting lists around one hundred aroma and flavour characteristics useful in describing the particular organoleptic profile of a wine.

Tasters, however, often resort to a type of shorthand to rapidly give a succinct indication in their tasting notes of how a wine will taste to the average consumer and some flavours or aromas will be encountered more often. This will often vary according to the origin, national or linguistic, of the author.

In English-speaking circles there is often mention of ‘blueberries’ or ‘blackberries’; whereas the French will often plump for ‘cassis’ (blackcurrant). Floral aromas will often be described as being of ‘elderflower’ by anglophones whereas ‘acacia’ will often be used by French-speakers.

This is typical of the way different languages will divide up the visible and invisible universe in order to describe it. This goes for colour and sound as well as for taste and smell. One man’s yellow is another man’s brown or red. Yet the actual colour is the same.  

Translation, therefore, can also be a game of taste and smell and finding appropriate ways of accurately communicating the equivalent perception in the other language.