Learn
Talking about wine without the jargon
Which wine words are useful and which are noise — the small vocabulary that genuinely helps you describe a wine, and the large one that mostly signals membership.
The short answer
Wine words are mostly analogies for sensations, not claims about ingredients. 'Mineral', 'buttery' and 'oaky' describe what a taster perceives; they do not mean the wine contains rock, butter or wood.
Overview
Useful and concrete: dry, sweet, light, full, crisp, soft, tannic, oaky, fruity, earthy. These describe things another person can verify.
Useful but needs care: minerality, which describes a real and widely shared impression while carrying an explanation that is not supported.
Largely noise: elegant, complex, well-balanced, expressive. These are evaluations dressed as descriptions, and they tell a listener almost nothing about the wine.
The honest test: would your description help someone else pick this wine off a shelf? "High acid, no oak, citrusy" would. "Charming and harmonious" would not.
Nobody is grading you. The goal of wine vocabulary is communication, not performance.
Where you can see it
- An analogy people take literally
- Minerality. Real as a perception, shared by many tasters, and with no demonstrated route from the rock in the vineyard to the glass.
- A word with a mechanism behind it
- Buttery. There is a compound responsible — diacetyl — and it comes from a bacterial fermentation, not from the oak.
Sources
Sources consulted
- WSET educational materials and the Systematic Approach to Tasting — Wine & Spirit Education Trust