I had my eye on a wine I had never tasted, a relative rarity that can be confusing given its name — the Heitz Cellar Martha’s Vineyard cabernet sauvignon. Martha’s Vineyard? one might ask. Who knew anyone made a good cab out off the coast of Massachusetts? In fact, the name comes from the fact that the grapes come from a plot of Napa land planted by Tom and Martha May. The 1970 vintage is among the American wines that put in a fine showing against their French counterparts in the 1976 Judgment of Paris.
I invited a couple of friends over the other night to help me drink a bottle of the 2015 Martha’s Vineyard I had bought. I wanted to see if we could taste the wine and talk about it without using any of the language common to wine tasting. You know the sort of vinous vocab I have in mind. Fruit. Red Fruit. Jam. Is there a red wine, whether Mouton-Rothschild or Carlo Rossi jug Chianti, that doesn’t have some flavors that could be described as red-fruit jam?
Even when fancier food descriptors are used, it doesn’t really convey much. Consider the Wine Spectator’s glowing review of the 2015 Martha’s Vineyard: “a display of slightly exotic plum and blackberry coulis flavors.” In some ways, this is unhelpfully generic — blackberry coulis differs from blackberry jam less in “flavors” than in consistency. And there is a perplexing specificity: We aren’t just presented with plum flavors, nor even “exotic plum,” but “slightly exotic plum.” I would be grateful to anyone who could explain to me the difference between plum flavors and slightly exotic plum flavors.
Wine Spectator also promises “dark licorice, menthol, and sassafras” and a “lingering hint of singed juniper.” I don’t know what to make of sassafras, but I do know licorice — I hate the stuff. I hate pastis. I hate raki. I hate anisette. I hate ouzo. If something even alludes to licorice, you’ll find me walking the other way. And yet I found the Heitz Cellar cabernet to be mercifully licorice-free.
This is not to deride Wine Spectator. Coming up with descriptions of flavor and scent is notoriously difficult and inescapably subjective. That’s why I tend to take more from opinionated judgments than I do from descriptors. Wine critic James Suckling awards the 2015 Martha’s Vineyard 98 points and declares it “luscious.”
That tells me more than Suckling’s effort at being specific with the flavors, “a light vanilla and currant undertone,” does. After all, one could probably attribute vanilla and currant undertones to cherry Pop-Tarts. But one would be hard-pressed to say of toaster pastries that they are luscious.
That may seem to counter good tasting practice. An article on wine-tasting from the University of Cambridge journal Natural Language Engineering noted that “experts use more source descriptions (e.g., red fruit, vanilla) for describing the smell and flavor of wine than novices, whereas novices used more evaluative terms (e.g., nice, lovely).” The linguists found that “experts use more specific, concrete words; for example, they say blackberry instead of fruit.”
But that doesn’t mean the expert can really specify that he’s onto blackberries, just that being specific suggests expertise.
Why don’t we adopt an entirely different approach, the one suggested by Evelyn Waugh in Brideshead Revisited? Sebastian Flyte and Charles Ryder try their hands at wine-tasting. Bored with the serious sort of descriptors, they reach for the fanciful. One glass is “a shy little wine like a gazelle.” Another is “a wise old wine,” a “prophet in a cave.” Among the offbeat metaphors they entertain is to say of one wine that it is “like the last unicorn.”
I like that. Pouring a round of the Martha’s Vineyard for my friends the other evening, I challenged them to find some such way of describing the wine. My friend Tim did so brilliantly. The wine was “like Lauren Bacall in To Have and Have Not,” he said.
Luscious indeed.
Eric Felten is the James Beard Award-winning author of How’s Your Drink?
