UNFILTERED with Dr. Elizabeth McQueen
A rose by any other name would smell as sweet, and other scripts for the taste of wine
Dr. Elizabeth McQueen on The Aesthetics and Language of Wine
Donkey and Goat Winery, Berkeley
Wednesday May 27: doors at 6, talk at 7:30
While the challenges of labeling or naming our experience extend across all art forms, does the effort to craft language for wine sit atop an invisible pyramid? If so, why?
The historian Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett wrote, “Wine is alive. It matures over the years and changes in even a few hours. It is an event. Even a single taste can be like an Act in a play that is as long as the life of the vintage.” (1999)
A taste of wine provokes myriad narratives: that ‘single taste’ exposes the interstitial space between high-art, craft, drug and agriculture. Historians, scientists, artists, winemakers, sommeliers, and retailers all grapple with the complexity of capturing a single taste in words–often requiring as complex a narration as that of a script for performance. But words often fail to capture the smells and tastes, or as Shakespeare alludes, names— blackberry, orange peel, funk, cloves, or rose in the case of Romeo—do not tell the whole story. Yet we don’t always consider the ways that cultural scripts affect processes of description in the present. How might we approach wine descriptions as both an art and a science, not only as a tool for marketing, but a mode for collaboration—and what does the struggle to name a taste reveal about the promise of embracing the limits, the ends of language, and ultimately, the power taste has over language?
This talk covers two significant, and interconnected, scripts for taste: wine science, and wine culture. We’ll cover Adrienne Lehrer’s influential linguistic study of wine descriptions in Wine & Conversation (1983) and Ann C. Noble’s Aroma Wheel (1991) to consider how language has shaped the science of wine. We’ll also explore how cultural scripts have shaped description, including viewing scenes from Sideways (2004), Bottleshock (2008), Succession (2018-), and Drops of God (2023-), in order to recover the art of description.