From time to time, I receive emails from a few retailers letting me know about new releases they have in stock. To get readers of these emails excited about how great these wines are, they include an excerpt from a leading wine "guru" along with his or her point rating.
That's standard stuff these days, so nothing particularly newsworthy regarding this. However, it was the language of one of the reviews I read earlier this week that made me sit up and pay attention (and frankly, laugh out loud.) Here are a few words of a review by David Schildknecht of The Wine Advocate about the 2011 Egon Muller Scharzhofberger Riesling Auslese:
"Muller's 2011 Scharzhofberger Riesling Auslese delivers a penetrating and multifarious nose of heliotrope, lily, candied lime rind, quince preserves, white peach preserves, distilled herbal essences, marzipan and brown spices... a kaleidoscopically interactive array of those diverse and exotic elements that on the nose signaled its ripeness and botrytis enoblement."
"Multifarious", "heliotrope", "kaleidoscopically"? Say what? Does anyone even know what the word "heliotrope" means? More importantly, why is a word like this being used to describe the perfumes of a wine?
I mean, I guessed the writer liked the wine, but this is ridiculous. It's no wonder that so many people poke fun at wine critics and wine reviews in general.
Then you have Antonio Galloni, who has essentially found a pet phrase that he loves to use again and again. That's "drop-dead gorgeous." He uses this term a lot - you could look it up. Drop-dead gorgeous - are we talking about a wine here or Angelia Jolie?
Look, I've been writing about wine for more than fifteen years and I know that you can only write pear, melon and apple aromas for white wines and cherry, plum and tar for red wines so often. Thus I can understand a critic wanting to break the mold from time to time.
That's fine, but talk to us in terms that first, are relevant to the wine (I don't consider, "drop-dead gorgeous" a proper term to describe a wine) and secondly, use words that we can understand. Yes, wine lovers, especially those searching for great wines made in limited production are intelligent people, but most of us don't use the word "multifarious" and we certainly don't talk about "an interactive array" of elements.
Writing such as this, it seems to me, is all about the critic trying to impress, trying to let everyone know about his vocabulary. He's basically talking down to us, letting us know he's more intelligent than we are.
Which brings me to an even more basic argument. When did the individual describing the wine become more important than the wine itself?
It's bad enough that too many people learn about wines with scores - basically the ultimate sound bites for wine. But writing such as this? It helps no one.
