Wine and conversation pdf

It doesn't have too many different flavours that you would normally expect with a good Shiraz. Click on the "Check Answers" button at the bottom of the quiz to check your answers.

When the answer is correct, two icons will appear next to the question. The first is an Additional Information Icon " ". The second is a Pronunciation Icon " ". A wine that has a taste or smell of wood, is described as Oaky: adjective A description of taste and smell. A lot of wine is stored in wood barrels containers during fermentation or ageing. These barrels are traditionally made of oak which is a type of wood , which is burnt with fire before the wine is placed inside.

This influences the colour, smell and taste of the wine. An oaky taste is a combination of different of tastes like caramel, vanilla, smoky, spicy, toasty. In Spanish: "sabor de roble". A wine that feels heavy in the mouth, is called Full-bodied: adjective This describes the weight and concentration of alcohol and flavours in the mouth.

There are three different classifications of weight and concentration. Normally, they are white wines, e. In Spanish: "de mucho cuerpo". It is commonly used when describing red wines. The taste or smell is like a cigar before smoking it.

It is a positive description. In Spanish: "tobaco". The aroma or smell of wine, is normally called the Nose: noun The 'nose' of a wine refers to its smell. It is sometimes called 'aroma' or 'bouquet', e. Normally, you gently move the wine in the glass to bring out the 'nose' of the wine it mixes the wine with the air. In Spanish: "nariz". A wine that has a taste or smell of burning wood, is described as Smoky: adjective This is both a taste and a smell.

The taste or smell is like the smoke from a wood fire. This flavour normally comes from the burnt oak barrel where the wine was stored. Some people also use 'toasty' to describe this taste and smell. In Spanish: "ahumado". A wine that has a taste or smell of pepper, cinnamon etc The taste or smell is similar to spices like black pepper, cinnamon, cumin etc This flavour normally comes from the oak barrel and the type of grape, e.

In Spanish: "especiado". An element in a wine that can make it taste bitter, is Tannin: noun It is a taste. It has a bitter taste, similar to a strong cup of tea and is normally found in red wines. Generally, 'full-bodied' red wines contain a lot of 'tannin'.

People often say that a sign of a lot of tannin in a wine is if it makes your mouth feel dry. The taste comes from the skins of the grapes. It can be both a positive and negative if the flavour dominates too much description.

A wine with a lot of 'tannin' is often called 'hard'. The opposite is 'soft'. In Spanish: "tanino". Can I get you something to drink? I could do with something to eat. I feel like a cup of tea. I need something to drink. What about going to the restaurant?

Let me invite you to the restaurant. Would you prefer a fast-food restaurant? This round is on me. The bill, please. Coffee is on the bouse. The waiter was very helpful. Is service included? There seems to be a mistake on this bill. Could I get the bill, please? Service not included. For example, the color of a young red wine should be different from that of an aged red wine brilliant ruby vs. Bouquet is considered more impor- tant than aroma and therefore receives 3 points to 1 point for aroma.

Scoring Systems 57 Table 5. Points are given for each of these stages, and some of the other characteristics, like sweetness, body, acid, and astringency, are relevant here although they are given or denied points elsewhere. Machemer says that one should judge wines differ- ently according to whether they are to be drunk immediately or be laid down.

Therefore, an unripe wine for immediate drinking would get a lower score than one to be stored for many years, where the judgment will be based on potential. The other items on the evaluation sheet are sugar, acid, balance, other tastes and flavors fruit, spiciness, earthi- ness, woodiness , and complexity. Another point system is the Broadbent-Johnson scorecard Johnson A maximum of 3 points is for sight clarity, color, viscosity , 6 for smell general appeal, fruit aroma, and bouquet , 8 for taste sweetness, tannin, acidity, body, finish, and balance , and 3 for overall quality.

Parker, Jr. Other wine publications eventually switched to the point scale because it was popular with consumers and wine merchants, includ- ing The Wine Spectator and The Wine Enthusiast McCoy — Even wine writers felt they had to jump on the bandwagon. But after many, many readers wanted something concrete that they could relate to, I relented and came down from the ivory-tower thinking that read- ers would sit and ponder my tasting notes alone for their decisions. Other systems also exist.

Peynaud describes some of the scoring systems used in France and elsewhere, including one by Vedel based on a logarithmic scale — But for now, and point scorecards are the most popular. More recently, Noble has shown the problems with any scorecard. I would argue that all quality scorecards are flawed. Any scorecard, on which color is rated and then aroma and flavor are assessed, presents an opportunity for biasing effects. Many terms on scorecards cannot be defined clearly.

Some of these problems can be handled for evaluating wines. The wines can be served in glasses where color is hidden, the order of wines can be randomized, and contexts can be held constant. But I believe that Noble is right in that there will be problems of some sort or another in judging quality by assigning points. This is largely, though not exclusively, because we are the most poorly equipped.

The most important tool at our disposal is inadequate for the job. That tool is the English language. Some semantic theories have been concerned mostly with the first of these relationships and other theories with the second.

This chapter provides a relatively informal and brief discus- sion of the intralinguistic connections. A more detailed and formal treatment appears in the appendix, sketching out a semantic theory that Keith Lehrer and I have been developing over the years.

The other aspect of meaning—the connection between language and the world—raises many interesting problems, some of which are investigated in this and later chapters. To what extent do speakers of the same language apply words to things, properties, events, and situa- tions in the same way? The experiments reported in part II show that there is considerable variation in how the same wine is described by different people.

If there is disagreement on word-world connections denotation , can we decide that some people are right and others are wrong? Who makes or should make such decisions? My major purpose in this chapter is to provide an account of mean- ing of the wine words. Therefore, I have eclectically borrowed from any semantic theories that provide a promising analysis of any part of the wine corpus. I do not wish to imply that there is no single theory that can in principle take care of the whole set of descriptors, but I have found that each theory so far developed provides an illuminating analysis of some word and sentence types and less illuminating analyses of other types.

Even if the words and sentence types can be forced into a procrustean bed, such analyses fail to show what is most interesting and significant about the linguistic expressions that are inappropriately handled. Even if a single semantic theory cannot satisfactorily account for everything, it may be useful in certain domains, and it may be perfectly adequate for that part of the vocabulary or for the sentence types for which it was proposed.

The wine corpus could also be looked at as a challenge for semantic theories or as a way of testing semantic theories. Any theory that fails to account for part of this corpus is deficient to that extent. However, this is a different enterprise and one that I shall leave for another time. Readers are invited to test their own favorite semantic theory using the wine descriptors. For wine descriptors the semantic field theory, developed by Saussure , Trier , Porzig , Lyons , , A.

Lehrer , Lutzeier , and many others is a good model. A semantic field is a content domain, such as color, kinship, artifacts subdivided into kinds of artifacts , animals, etc. For each semantic field there is a set of lexical items lexemes that are placed in correspondence to it, or to divide it. The semantic field of taste is articulated or expressed by the English words sweet, sour, bitter, and salty. One important part of the theory is the types of lexical relation- ships.

Although many semantic relations have been proposed, the four that are most relevant to wine descriptors are synonymy, antonymy, hyponymy, and incompatibility.

The first two are familiar to most people. Incompatibility, like antonymy, deals with sets that contrast. Hyponymy is a technical name for class inclusion. Taxonomies are typical types of hyponymic structures. An example would be the relation- ship of grape to fruit. Grape is a hyponym of fruit, and conversely, fruit is a hypernym of grape. Incompatible terms are cohyponyms but con- trast.

In Figure 6. In fact, since most words in a language have a range of senses, it is difficult to find examples where words are substitutable fruit grape peach apple pear mango pineapple Figure 6. So substitution is limited to certain contexts. In the wine domain, claret and Bordeaux are synonyms, as are heavy and big, but they are not synonyms in other contexts. Antonymy is a much more complex concept, and there are many types of antonyms.

The most important one for wine descriptors is gradable antonymy. In this type, the words can be modified by intensi- fiers like very, more, less, or not as. Many of the figures in chapter 1 employ antonymous scales as with dry-sweet, heavy-light, soft-hard.

This semantic relationship—the meaning of a word in terms of its ref- erence or denotation —is discussed in detail in the appendix. There are standard arguments against this theory as a general account of meaning, since it is not clear what words like not, and, or if refer to.

However, it is certainly the case that a large part of the vocabulary denotes things, properties, actions, processes, and events. Words that are amenable to such analyses would include names for certain prop- erties, such as colors, and names for many types of physical objects, such as animals and plants, artifacts, and some geographical features. Moreover, the objects, properties, etc. We are faced with the problem of accounting for how a particular word is connected to something or some set of things.

How is it that grape, for example, denotes a set of green or purple globular objects that grow on vines? An account is proposed by Putnam , who has elaborated the facet of expert opinion and has proposed a hypoth- esis of the division of linguistic labor. For wine, the expert would be an enologist. Every linguistic community exemplifies the sort of division of linguistic labor. A substance that was like water but not com- posed of H2O or a tiger-like animal that had a radically different DNA structure in its genes would not be classified as water or tiger, accord- ing to Putnam.

A Cabernet Sauvignon wine is one that is made from Cabernet Sauvignon grapes. However, even here we can rely on experts to fix the designation and make the appro- priate judgments.

These experts may be different from those experts who fix the designation of the natural kind terms. Those fixing natural kind terms would be botanists, while those fixing wine types would be enologists or possibly shippers in the wine trade.

Wines made from certain varietals have a number of stereotypic properties, and it is these perceptual properties that enable trained wine drinkers to identify the wine by tasting it. However, these stere- otypic properties are not a necessary part of the denotation, since a varietal grown in an unusual soil in an unusual region may taste and smell different. There are, in addition, typical ways of making wines from certain grapes that further help wine experts to identify the vari- etals.

Although Cabernet Sauvignons are almost always made into dry red wine and are often aged in oak, if a winemaker decided to make a white wine out of Cabernet Sauvignon, leave 7 percent residual sugar, and age it in cedarwood, it would still be a Cabernet Sauvignon wine, though, ironically, no longer a Cabernet Sauvignon type.

A second class of words for which a Putnam analysis has some plau- sibility contains names for wines that are derived from the place where the grapes are grown. Examples are Champagne, Sauternes, Graves, and Burgundy. But these wines must also be made from legally prescribed grape varietals, and it is the latter requirement that gives each of these wines their specific characteristics. I suppose that if the people who make Mouton Rothschild were to tear out their current vines, replace them with Thompson seedless grapes, and make wine from them, they would lose their privilege of calling their new wine a classified Bordeaux.

However, since in at least some areas there are several grape varietals allowed, and since different winemakers use different amounts and different combinations of these grapes for their wines, the resulting wines differ significantly from natural kinds.

An adequate semantic analysis shows the intralinguistic relationships among words. The relationships among the words we have looked at so far those for natural kinds and for wines named after places are quite simple—synonymy, hyponymy, and incompatibility.

Incompatible terms denote different, nonoverlapping sets of objects. There are standard objections to deriving intralinguistic relationships from extension, and expressions like necessarily and in all possible worlds attempt to remedy them, so that creature with a heart and creature with a liver do not turn out to be synonymous. However, meaning postulates are always available to express the intralinguis- tic relationships.

In any case, deriving the intralinguistic relationships from extension works for only a small proportion of the words in the domain. As we shall see in the next three classes, the use of extension is inadequate. Gradable Adjectives When we turn to descriptors like heavy, light, smooth, rough, young, or old, we encounter new difficulties and complexities. What property does something have to have to be heavy or old? Is it the same thing for wines as for people?

Is a five-year-old wine an old one? Who decides? One major difference between these scalar words, often called grada- ble terms, is that they admit of degrees, whereas natural kind terms do not. We can say, Wine X is heavier than wine Y.

But a question such as, Is this wine more of a Zinfandel than that? The hearer is required to reinterpret the question to make sense of it. The grada- ble antonyms4 heavy-light, sweet-dry, old-young are defined as those antonyms that do not divide the semantic domain sharply into two parts but rather admit of intermediate cases. So we can say, This wine is neither heavy nor light, but in between. There are many syntactic and semantic complexities connected with these words: I will mention only some of the problems connected with their interpretations in sen- tences about wine.

Terms like heavy and light are characterized by dictionaries as hav- ing many senses, but their most salient meaning is in the field of weight.

They denote weight in some contexts, body in oth- ers, saturation in still others. Even if one does not take this route and rather sticks with the standard treatment, the most significant thing about them in terms of their intralinguistic relationship is that they are scalar antonyms, and this intralinguistic fact may be more important than the denotation of such terms. To say that context is important is true but inadequate, even if the context can be narrowed to wine.

Entailments that work for unmodified nouns do not necessarily hold when a gradable modifier is used. The Rhines are heavier than the Moselles, and also A is heavier than B. Now it might be true that wine B is heavy for a wine but light for a Rhine.

Therefore, the context must be narrowed even further—to heavy for a Rhine wine, or for a Rhine wine from a certain vineyard in a certain year. Although there are many analyses of gradable terms, the one I favor is the comparative one5 in which a term like heavy is analyzed as an implicit comparison, with as assumed norm. Sapir , a defender of this view writes, Such contrasts as small and large, little and much, few and many, give us a deceptive feeling of absolute values within the field of quantity com- parable to such qualitative differences as red and green within the field of color perception.

Many of the wine descriptors are gradable and imply a norm. The norm, however, depends on the context, and frequently it is not always apparent to participants in a conversation. It can become more and more specified: all French Burgundies, or Burgundies from Beaune, or Burgundies from a part of Beaune in a certain year. Wine experts appear to use a narrower reference class than nonexperts, probably because they know more about wine subclasses and are more famil- iar with the typical characteristics of each subclass.

The experiments described in part II show that the lack of specification of the relevant reference class is a cause of lack of consensus in describing wines and a source of miscommunication.

A speaker may say, Wine X is light, and have in mind California Cabernet Sauvignons from Napa Valley, whereas the listener has as a reference class all red wines.

In the application of these gradable expressions, there may be some threshold conditions. A wine with 10 percent sugar will very likely be judged sweet by everyone, and a wine with no sugar will be judged dry. The question of whether such a wine would be too sweet is still another issue, taken up in the next section.

So we can see shifting even here. Presumably a wine with 30 percent sugar would be sweet and prob- ably cloying with respect to every reference class. But in the intermedi- ate cases, say a wine with 1 percent sugar, there will be disagreement as to whether it is sweet or dry, and the term semisweet could be used. Similar examples can be found for other descriptors. There are some wines that are so light, they would be judged as such with respect to any wine reference class. A year-old wine would be old even for a vintage Port.

Some wine descriptors straddle both classes we have discussed— natural kind terms and gradable predicates. Examples are chalky, earthy, buttery, woody, oaky, maderized, oxydized, and tannic. These terms denote rather specific properties, and in this way they resemble natural kind terms.

But they also admit of degrees. Wine A can be earthier than wine B. They are also vague in presupposing some ref- erence classes. Wine A may be chalky for a white wine but not for a Chablis, while wine B is tannic, even for a Cabernet. Semantic Analysis 69 How are we to fix the denotation of these gradable terms in any given context? That is, who is to decide whether a wine is heavy for a Clos de Vougeot?

The role of experts was already mentioned with regard to making judgments of class membership with respect to natural kind terms. The judgments and opinions of some members of the society—experts—are given more weight than those of other people, and appealing to the judgments of experts may also be reason- able in the case of gradable terms as well. But for these terms, it is not just wine scientists but also sommeliers, wine merchants, and other knowledgeable people who use these terms.

Both wine experts and nonexperts are inclined to agree that the judgments by experts carry more weight than judgments by others. Of course, if experts disagree among themselves as they often do , then we have not solved the problem. We can try to find a way of determining which experts are more expert, or we can give up and say that we do not know who is right, or we can say that a statement like Wine X is heavy for a Clos de Vougeot has no truth-value—that is, it is neither true nor false.

In stating the semantic relationships among gradable expressions, synonyms and hyponyms can either be derived from denotation or stated in terms of meaning postulates. In either case, the context of relevant domain must be stated, since certain expressions that are synonyms or hyponyms in the wine domain are not necessarily so in other domains. Philosophers have wor- ried about the meaning of good in various contexts.

One can always make trivial statements, of course, such as that good denotes anything that is good, but one expects a semantic analysis to be more enlighten- ing.

Whereas there is considerable agreement on picking out tigers, chairs, and lemons, how does one pick out heroes, villains, and fools? Klapp in his study of social typing shows that one individual may classify a person, Franklin D. To deal with the evaluative words in the wine domain, we need not solve all the problems with using good, however; we can select a treatment that will do for the more limited purposes at hand—the wine vocabulary.

The most reasonable place to begin is with treatments of good in aesthetics. In any case, wine defi- nitely has an aesthetic aspect, and like food and other beverages, it is supposed to give pleasure. Many of the problems involved in evaluat- ing art are relevant to those of wine as well: selecting criteria for evalu- ation, accounting for differences of taste among people and changes in taste from time to time and place to place, and justifying judgments.

The first thing to point out about good and related terms is that they are gradable terms, like those in the previous class of words heavy, sweet , and some reference group is implied. Thus a wine made from Thompson seedless or Mission grapes may be good for its type but ordinary for a wine in general, since the potential from these varietals is limited. Another thing to point out is that the semantic relationships between good and bad must be stated in terms of meaning postulates, as was done with gradable antonyms like heavy and light.

Dickie and Urmson survey a number of analyses of good. Emotivism is the view that evaluative sentences do not assert anything—they are merely expressive. To say Wine X is good is to invite or induce the hearer to hold a favorable attitude toward wine X. However, these criteria cannot be further justified; the judges decide to accept them, and different judges may adopt different sets of criteria.

A bit of relativism is necessary to account for the fact that experts with comparable creden- tials may disagree. Wine connoisseurs trained on European wines often fail to appreciate the characteristics of California wine, and vice versa. Nonnatural intuitionism which Dickie calls Platonism 2 is the view that all beautiful things have certain empirical properties and that one can discover what these properties are Dickie Therefore, criteria are available on which judgments can be based.

Allowing for differences of criteria among experts such as whether blended wines are better than unblended wines , there are a number of general criteria that are widely accepted for judging all wines and some additional criteria for judging specific wines.

Botrytis is a virtue in Sauternes, and maderization is a necessary feature of Sherry, but these would be considered defects in Chardonnay. For wine, these fea- tures are nearly right, but one speaks of balance rather than unity, and intensity might be included in something else—possibly flavorfulness since the opposite would be blandness or insipidness.

After criteria are established, others can learn to judge according to these criteria. Or, in the context of grading cheese, It is a fact that there is a stable majority we need not now settle among which people the majority will be who prefer, like, choose, cheese with the characteristics ABC.

Then ABC become the characteristics which are accepted even by the majority, for grading cheese. Thus, even if one happens to hate all cheese, one will still be able sensibly to distinguish good from bad cheese. Lehrer would describe it as a naturalistic theory in that the goodness is in the wine.

Experts and connoisseur wine drinkers learn what the criteria of good and great wines are and through experience and practice learn to apply these criteria to wines. Like natural kind terms and scalar terms, the judgments of experts determine what is a good wine and what is a bad wine. This position assumes that experts agree, which is not completely true. Robert M. In any case, most nonexperts are likely to yield authority on the quality of wine to experts, even when they do not agree with preferences of those experts.

This is an empirical issue, and my sample of such wine drinkers is too small to confirm this view. There are a number of evaluative terms besides good and bad. For example, there are degrees of goodness—fine and great wines, for exam- ple, are very good. There are two ways of looking at fine and great with respect to good. On one hand, good can be seen as a general term a hypernym , with fine and great being hyponyms fig.

Alternatively, fine and great can be analyzed as extending the scale of good fig. The not in this sentence is a metalinguistic use of not Horn The purpose of not is to show that the word good is inadequate or inap- propriate as opposed to denying the goodness of the wine. The details are provided in the appendix. They are words that involve classes 2 and 3. Examples are thin, coarse, sour, unbal- anced as negative descriptors, and smooth, balanced, and delicate as positive ones.

As was emphasized in chapter 1, evaluation permeates the wine vocabulary. Some terms are generally neutral dry, light, young , but they may take on evaluative force in certain contexts.

The descriptive part of these words can be analyzed like the other gradable expressions in class 2. For instance, a thin or watery wine is to be treated as a light wine—either relative to all wines or to a subset of wines. The same treatment discussed with respect to good and great is operative here, since we can define thin either as a part of the light- ness scale or as an extension of it. Watery seems to be a hyponym or extension of thin.

Figure 6. Since hyponymy is transitive, watery also entails very light, or in this case, perhaps very, very light, but my intui- tions here are uncertain. I can find no example where a positive word must contain a too indexer in its definition. It is, in fact, hard to imagine how something can be undesirably good. However, this is different from saying that a wine has too much of a property, where having a small amount of that property would be good.

This is the difference between sweet and light heavy thin watery Figure 6. Wine A belongs to the set vvL. In addition, wine A is judged by experts to be defective. The analysis of good and other evaluative terms or words with an evaluative component proposed here is only intended to serve for wine discourse.

I do not suggest or deny that such an analysis can be extended to other aesthetic realms. It is highly unlikely that it can be extended to ethics or picking out instances of heroes, villains, and fools. Interpreting the Metaphors There are still many words unaccounted for, such as honest, decrepit, pretentious, taut, and many of the new words like brawny and muscu- lar, which are used in new and metaphorical ways.

Most linguists and philosophers of language treat metaphor, at least novel metaphor, as a part of pragmatics, rather than semantics, and may propose strategies for interpreting novel uses of words.

Consider the words for age and maturity. Actually, this vocabulary takes words from two different semantic fields—the ages and stages of human beings and the growth and development of plants.

From human development we get young, old, and some nega- tive descriptors associated with old age like decrepit and senile. From the plant domain we get green and unripe which have acquired con- ventional senses for people and also withered.

Therefore, we can interpret the phrase a decrepit or senile wine as one that is too old and has lost its desir- able qualities. The association between senility and old age is based on stereotypes; such stereotypes are not true of everyone or maybe not even of most people , but they are the link to interpreting the meaning.

In addition, having moved beyond conventional meaning, there may be differences in interpretation. How do we interpret a brawny or muscular wine? As we saw with heavy, there is a link to big, and in thinking about people, there are associations to body types, which include brawny, muscular, stout, fat, and big-boned.

Since light is the antonym of heavy, we can figure out that a brawny wine is not light. The hyponyms of light, such as svelte, lean, thin, will be interpreted as not heavy.

The Semillon will be sweet and rich. The opposite is true with red wines, as they age they lose colour. White wines maderise while red wines oxidise. For red wines, a brick tinge at the rim tells you how old it is, the more orange and less blue, the older the wine. The lighter the rim the older it is. The rim can almost be colourless. Related Papers The wine bible karen macneil By navnit kumar.