Note: Today’s post -- on Matt Kramer's True Taste: The Seven Essential Wine Words -- is the second in a series of wine book reviews of recent releases to hit the market. Yesterday we looked at Oz Clarke’s The History of Wine in 100 Bottles: From Bacchus to Bordeaux and Beyond, and next will be Lettie Teague’s Wine in Words: Notes for Better Drinking. Please share your own thoughts in the Comments!
It isn't as though there are only seven words we should use to talk about wine.
It's that those seven words resonate more meaningfully than most of the descriptors that are often used in tasting notes to describe a wine.
That's the premise of Matt Kramer's new book, True Taste: The Seven Essential Wine Words. Here they are: Insight, Harmony, Texture, Layers, Finesse, Surprise, and Nuance.
Identifying those seven -- and describing their significance -- is the greatest value of Kramer's contribution in this book. They suggest a shift in how we talk, and therefore think, about wine, not by replacing the list of tasting note descriptors we've come to recognize, but by enhancing them.
The exercise of evaluating wine is an important one for advancing our appreciation of it. Kramer has added to our toolkit, whether we're new to the exercise or are experienced practitioners.
These are tools for fine handiwork, for sure. It's the difference, in Chapter Three, between "balance" and "harmony." It's the difference, in Chapter Five, between "complexity" and "layers." It's also the difference, in Chapter Seven, between "surprise" and "unfamiliarity."
Kramer's Chapter Six, on Finesse, is his strongest and in my opinion the most articulated. If I imagine myself in the shoes of a new, earnest wine drinker, I'll value this chapter for its usefulness and applicability. It's a challenge for a new drinker to identity some of these terms -- Texture, for example, and Surprise -- so it's especially helpful when Kramer doesn't just talk about a concept (like Finesse) in a know-it-when-you-see-it kind of way; he explains why you see it, and he lists the circumstances out of which wines of Finesse tend to come. That helps a new drinker to connect the dots, which makes the wine -- and the words to describe it -- stickier in their memory.
Matt Kramer's new book, True Taste: The Seven Essential Wine Words, adds to our toolkit of... [+]
This book gave me pause, since the focus of my own writing is less on evaluating wine and more often on the people who made it for us to drink. That's fine -- Kramer works his side of the wine writing street, and I work mine (to borrow an effective metaphor he uses, also in the chapter on Finesse). Even though I miss the people of wine throughout the text, this book does not seem abstract. That's to Kramer's credit. He digs in to the glass and hunts for significance there, which is an effort that I appreciate. This is where he and I meet, so to speak, in the middle of our sides of the street.
One of my favorite lines comes from the chapter on Nuance: "Without nuance a wine has no shadings, no subtleties, no layered depths... If there are few dark corners to a wine, no intimation of secrets, your attention wavers after a few sniffs and sips; then it departs altogether. You either then continue to drink unthinkingly or push it away in search of something more intriguing."
I agree with this, much as I agree with Kramer's most salient points. I disagree with some of the routes he takes -- namely his use of neurological jargon to explain our need for value judgments, and dismissing the "blithe self-assurance" he finds in France and Italy in favor of what he considers more careful wine criticism. I was also distracted by his first chapter on "the myths of modern wine tasting," and by half of the chapter on Insight. I would have preferred instead to jump straight to the meat of his seven concepts.
I'm with him at the finish line, however, when the finish line is the more frequent use of meaningful vocabulary -- including these seven words -- to communicate about wine.
Cathy Huyghe is the author of Hungry for Wine, which will be released this fall. Find her on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
