We were recently sent an interesting article by our friend Carl Giavanti, a winery PR consultant based in Portland, Oregon.

Allison, Carl Giavanti & Chris.

The article is titled “Does Wine Writing Have to Be So Embarrassing?”. That article, written by Jason Wilson, is in fact a response to a different article written by Axel Halberstadt and published in the New York Times, titled “Maggie Harrison’s War on Wine”. Maggie Harrison is an icon in American winemaking, having made the wines for several years at Central California’s Sine Qua Non winery and now at her own Antica Terra winery in Oregon. Maggie happened to be in the restaurant at the same time we were dining with Carl in early June and he introduced us to her. Given this interconnection of events, Carl was interested in our reaction to the article.

For reference, the two articles can be found here and here. As wine writers, we were naturally a little taken aback by the title of Mr. Wilson’s article. Is what we write embarrassing? We don’t think so, nor do we find the many other pieces of wine writing we regularly read to be embarrassing either. But now our interest was quite piqued to find out more about this alleged embarrassment.

Maggie Harrison [source: Los Angeles Times]

It’s not entirely clear just what it is that Mr. Halberstadt writes in his article on Harrison that Mr. Wilson finds so “embarrassing”. Wilson derides Halberstadt’s linking of taste and aroma experiences to visual experiences but doesn’t bother to go into why. He also makes no link to his much broader statement inferred by his title that a good deal more than just this one article written about wine is “embarrassing”. His opening sentence is, “Dear Reader, please know that I am tired. Exhausted by our wine media.”

Pinot Noir grapes ready for harvest in Oregon.

For context, Halberstadt’s article describes a series of interviews he had with winemaker Maggie Harrison. The article describes Harrison’s rise to becoming one of the most celebrated winemakers in the U.S. and who is now making some highly collectible (and expensive) wines made from Pinot Noir grown in Oregon and California. Halberstadt then spends considerable time describing Harrison’s very labour-intensive blending protocol that she uses to blend grapes from various vineyards in two different states, into a finished wine. If you are with me so far, you are probably asking “What’s embarrassing about that?”. We are too.

Where Halberstadt seems to veer off the rails, at least in Wilson’s view, is when Halberstadt makes the previously mentioned link between smell and taste and makes a visual equivalence.

The tasting room at Château Suduiraut complete with aroma samples.

The offending lines in Halberstadt’s article were “I can’t tell you what Antica Terra [a Maggie Harrison wine] tasted or smelled like. The vines had produced an extraordinary grape, a tiny, tannic berry of intense, almost disagreeable complexity. But the lists of flavors you see in typical tasting notes amount to a kind of bragging about the acuity of the writer’s palate, and they are also banal and dishonest–far more than pencil lead, marmalade or saddle leather, wine tastes like itself.”

“What matters are the things it makes you perceive, feel and think about and how it lives in your memory. Tasting any great wine can be as immersive as watching a film. But Antica Terra took me somewhere beyond that. First, it made me see colors: the inkiest indigos and the bluest blacks, streaked with fissures of silver. Then I pictured something lurching out of a cave on a moonless night during a thunderstorm, which made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. And I thought about Jacques Lardière, the great former winemaker at Louis Jadot in Burgundy, talking about the ‘unconscious of the earth.”

Chris assessing a glass of wine at Chateau Couspaude in Bordeaux.

Wilson responds to that paragraph by writing “So, according to this logic: If I describe a wine (say, a Loire Valley cabernet franc) in “typical tasting notes,” as having savory aromas and flavors of olive, tomato, oregano, and a hint of pencil lead on the finish, and I suggest it pairs really well with pizza, my “typical” tasting notes are “banal and dishonest”? But if I say that a wine “made me see colors: the inkiest indigos and the bluest blacks, streaked with fissures of silver” or that it made me “picture something lurching out of a cave on a moonless night during a thunderstorm” or that I thought of “the great former winemaker at Louis Jadot in Burgundy” then…what? This pretentious drivel is perceiving, feeling, and thinking about it? Cool descriptions, bro.”

The science behind Synesthesia [pinterest.com]

Where Wilson loses the plot is how this visual equivalence is in fact a part of Maggie Harrison’s perception of the world due to her having a rare disease known as Synesthesia. In the article on Harrison, Halberstadt writes “The causes of the condition remain poorly understood, but at least one study suggests that synesthetes may have an enhanced capacity for creativity, possibly because of increased connectivity among regions of the cerebral cortex and are more likely to enter creative professions. Nikola Tesla, David Hockney, Duke Ellington and Frank Ocean have reported having it. In “Speak, Memory,” Nabokov describes learning as a child that he shared the condition with his mother while playing with alphabet blocks: ‘We discovered that some of her letters had the same tint as mine.’”

Halberstadt was showing empathy to Harrison’s synthesia and putting himself in her shoes when he described the colours that tasting her wines evoked in him. To take that one journalistic trope and extend it to all wine writing as either embarrassing or exhausting is nonsense. Putting into words our various olfactory and gustatory sensations is notoriously difficult. A purely direct approach, the very accurate “this smells and tastes like wine” doesn’t help your reader at all. Everyone knows that; you have added nothing to the conversation.

Making wine tasting notes at Lauren Ashton.

Wine writers must search for words that describe what that taste or smell evokes from their memory as they experience the wine. Wine writers must go to the derivative sensation to make the communication work. Pinot Noir tastes different than cherries taste; but if the Pinot you are drinking evokes that experience of having cherries, then something useful is communicated between writer and reader. It is not exact, but it’s not embarrassing either.

As to the visual equivalence used by Halberstadt, that was clearly a one-off, used in a special context regarding a person with a special condition. It is an equivalent, regardless of how useful it may or may not have been, that we have never seen before. It is hardly the norm in wine writing; if Wilson doesn’t like it, that’s fine. As wine writers we all know that there is a subjective aspect to appreciation, and we are all entitled to like whatever we like. But this single instance hardly speaks for wine writing in general.

Do you consider wine art?

Halberstadt briefly enters the “wine is art” territory. We can certainly understand debating that concept. But again, context is important. Halberstadt goes to that conversation because his interviews took place at Harrison’s home where she displays many works of art, and at an art gallery. Art was very much a part of the Harrison environment that Halberstadt was writing about. The reference to art was not much more than that of context for their conversation and who Maggie Harrison, the person, is.

Wine writing in general is not embarrassing. It is a useful craft, attempting to explain the almost ineffable experience of tasting, with mere words. It’s the same as the music critic who searches for other words that evoke what listening to particular piece inspires, rather than simply stating the notes that were played. A description of the dimensions of a painting and the colours used would be far more accurate than any published critical review, but not nearly as useful to its reader. So it is with good wine writing, where the message is conveyed with analogies and similarities. As in other forms of appreciation, there is nothing embarrassing about it.