Proof: The Science of Booze

by Adam Rogers

Quandt thinks that pros like Parker—or your friend who always makes a big show over the wine list at a restaurant—are essentially making it all up. Or, like some storefront psychics, possibly they think they know what they’re talking about, when in actuality they’ve merely intuited their way into a con. “I find it impossible to imagine that somebody can take a composite impression of a wine and decompose it into eight components and identify each one individually—a little bit of tobacco and a little of honey flavor and a little bit of citrus and a little bit of wet earth and a little bit of molding bushes,” Quandt says. Way back in 1937, the humorist James Thurber stuck it to this kind of pompous, meaning-free connoisseurship in a New Yorker cartoon showing a wine taster saying of a glass, “It’s a naive domestic Burgundy without any breeding, but I think you’ll be amused by its presumption.” A wonderful Roald Dahl short story, “Taste,” from 1951, similarly depicts a hyper-verbal wine snob as a con artist and a fraud. If you really want to blame someone for the wine world’s excesses of verbal fluff, you might point a finger at the writer Pamela Vandyke Price. Her 1975 book The Taste of Wine popularized such descriptors as “forthcoming,” “pinched,” “sloppy,” and “vivacious” as opposed to something more specific, or more chemical. Booze reviewers have been doing the same thing ever since.

Hahahahahahahahahaa. Exactly.