Writing is a profession. Not everyone can do it, even though we all went to school and learned to read and write. But that is like saying that getting a driver’s license means then knowing how to drive well. That is clearly not the case.
Knowing how to write well is not just a matter of grammar. It means. be able to communicate, to inform, sometimes even teaching. Uncommon skills and especially not easy to learn.
In the world of wine, it is even more complex, because those skills must include skills in popularization, in even minimal knowledge of oenological processes, elements of viticulture, geology, even history, literature and geography. So those who write about wine may not be winemakers or even agronomists or literary professors, but they must at least understand what all those who are, say, do and write about it.
In addition, he needs to understand what the wines express organoleptically, and try to write it without any self-referential rhetoric. In the sense that an average audience that is unaware of technical matters, and can hardly distinguish one wine from another, cares almost nothing about what a taster or self-styled taster feels when tasting a particular wine. There are Continuous misunderstandings and much confusion.
Just think that the term “fruity,” which according to any sommelier school is attributed to primary and fermentative aromas, for the majority of consumers is instead a sweet and at best aromatic flavor, because it relates to fruit, which is, indeed, sweet.
Always explain
So I try to say that one of the fundamental things in communicating anything related to the world of wine, just as Don Lorenzo Milani said, is to explain whatever terms you use in a discourse. It is almost a moral duty, a respect for those who waste time listening to us, devoting even a minimal part of their existence to it. Because, if someone listens to us, something they will need to understand must be there, and the demonstration of how good we are at describing a wine is a function of that, and not of a taster’s narcissism.
The aromas and flavors of a wine
Then you have to be precise. The aromas of a wine cannot be the delirium of a taster, but must Define what is actually in the wine. We may not call them terpenes but floral aromas, not thiols but exotic fruit and flint scents, not lactones but hints of fresh almond, and so on. But when we have defined by olfactory recognition a family of elements present in that particular wine, that is more than enough.
With flavors it is easier, because that tannins inhibit salivation and organic acids stimulate it is obvious, and it is this that has to be explained and made to be understood concretely, by tasting, precisely.
Careful not to lapse into rhetoric
But that’s not the end of it, of course. There is everything rhetorical and unbearable to do with so-called “storytelling” that can lapse into rhetoric With great speed. Because to write about wine you have to know how to write. Another thing that is too easily taken for granted.
And to write well you have to have imagination, of course, technique, for sure, but also the desire to tell something, and not simply to prove in an almost childish way how much better and more competent we are than those who read us. But, rather, To pose the problem of making us understand by anyone who has the patience to read or listen to us, hoping to gain information and knowledge. Disclosing in the most effective way possible.
I close by wondering how it is that people like the late Piero Angela and his son Alberto, or Mario Tozzi, or David Attemborough have made complex topics of science and history understood, and we in the wine world, with a few rare but valid exceptions (I am thinking of the Breath of Wine Professor Moio’s) we can’t? It is also self-criticism, evidently, however, let us all think a little more.
