Decoding the Language of Wine Tasting

Understanding the wine you taste is only half the battle; communicating your impressions to others in words is just as big a challenge. And since the wine itself disappears as you drink it, verbal descriptions are the only way to preserve the pleasure wine provides.

It’s easy to ridicule our feeble attempts to put wine into words. Perhaps the most famous satire on tasting notes is a James Thurber cartoon: Three people at a dinner table look quizzically at their host, who’s got a glass in his hand and a manic look in his eye, saying, “It’s merely a naive domestic Burgundy, but I think you’ll be amused by its presumption.”


In fact, the struggle to develop a lucid and coherent vocabulary for wine tasting has been going on for centuries. In his landmark study, The Taste of Wine, Bordeaux enologist Emile Peynaud traces the slow accretion of terms commonly used to describe fine wines. Ancient Greeks and Romans wrote about wine, and even in the 15th century there are references to wines called “good, clean, honest and commercial.” But the true taster’s vocabulary really began in the 18th century, when Bordeaux wines such as Haut-Brion and Lafite began to be sold at four to five times the price of ordinary claret, and it became necessary to find words to describe and justify the difference.

Based on extensive research in the literature of wine, Peynaud culled about 40 terms used in the late 18th century, ranging from “acrid,” “sour” and “hot,” to “lively,” “fine” and “strong.” More specific flavor descriptors appear in the 19th century, such as “balsamic,” “herbal” and “woody.” A manual for wine merchants published in 1896 used nearly 200 different descriptors, and today Peynaud recognizes over a thousand terms commonly used to describe wines. In fact, the vocabulary has gotten a bit out of hand; in Wines: Their Sensory Evaluation, Maynard Amerine and Edward Roessler list over 300 terms to avoid in wine description, including the innocuous “charming” and “intense” and even the antique “lively.”

Wine Spectator attempts to use commonsense words to describe wines in our tasting reports. Our goal is to characterize the wine in general terms, give several distinctive taste descriptors, compare it to other wines of its specific type and indicate when it may be drinking at its best. Though writing tasting notes is more of an art than a science, the descriptions give a fuller idea of a wine’s character than the accompanying score, which locates the wine on a comparative quality ranking.

Here are recent tasting notes for three wines, all Chardonnays, that differ widely in quality and character. By “deconstructing” them, I hope to make all our notes more accessible to readers, and to assist you in developing your own vocabulary for describing the wines you taste.