Kermit Lynch's take on wine 'language'

In the past few days I became involved in a food board discussion that wound its way around to the 3-part interview Gary Vaynerchuk did with Kermit Lynch a few weeks ago on wine Library TV. http://tv.winelibrary.com/index.php?s=lynch

Most of the comments were to trash Vaynerchuk for his frequent interruption of Lynch (Gary can certainly be annoying as hell if you don’t ‘get him’ and sometimes even if you do). But… when I watched the interviews I was fascinated by the simplicity of Lynch’s insistence that all the frequently used adjectives used to describe taste and aroma are pretty much useless and unnecessary. I’m wondering what others here think of that opinion.

In my short exposure to the retail wine world I tried very hard to develop relationships with customers in which my telling them they would just ‘like’ a wine, or that it just ‘tasted good’ would be enough. I used adjectives usually as a method of communication (a language) to try to get at what they liked or would like, and to describe what I had tasted. The ultimate goal, though, was the simplicity of what Lynch was saying… that ‘you will enjoy this wine’ or that ‘this is a wine that just tastes good!’ would be enough.

I do wonder, though, if there isn’t a marketing reason for Lynch’s stand on the use of adjectives. After all, he has built his entire business on the name ‘Kermit Lynch’ on the bottle recommending it. Adjectives would, it seems to me, just get in the way of that message. I’m not finding fault with him for this… just trying to understand it.

What do you think?

“This is a wine that tastes good” is useless though. What’s good? To whom? If I like a wine and tell you it tastes good, what does that mean? What if I love big Pinots with dark fruit and you love lighter styled Pinots with complex, floral aromatics?

Now, can two people who know each others’ palates say “You’ll love this it tastes great!” and have it mean something> Sure. But that breaks down when you’re talking to a general audience or when you’re talking to someone whom you don’t know.

Granted, some of the specifics people go into are silly, but if I tell you somethign smells like leather and cigar box or has a hint of spices or forest floor, or that it has bright red fruit vs dark fruit you get real information. I find it silly to reduce our sensory and linguistic range to simply ‘good’.

To your point about Kermit using this as a marketing tool - that can be good for his customers. IF you buy a lot from him and know his palate (and share it) then “This is really good” is enough. However, it’s not in most cases.

I get what you are saying, but I often come to the opposite conclusion - too many people write complicated, Parker-esque adjective-laden descriptors that are clearly a product of their attempt to intellectualize the process and ‘play the game.’ Those notes are worse than an honest ‘I liked it.’ At a certain point, their attempt to out-think the experience completely compromises any concordance with objective reality their account might have.

A.

I prefer VERBS to adjectives:

The acidity LIFTS the flavors and CLEANSES your palate.

The tannins are there to COUNTERACT and BALANCE fats in food.

This wine will GET YOU LAID!

These structural elements are more important than actual flavors sometime.

I like the idea of what Kermit was trying to say. For me, I’m olfactorily (sp?) challenged. I’ve got a few categories that I think about when I taste wine.

Balance - my #1 criteria
Power - more is not always better; except to the nose (IMHO)
Typicity- does this wine have something in common with other wines of the region; maybe uggghhh…dare I say it, terroir
Pleasure - Reading ok on the prior 3 doesn’t guarantee this; here is where specific flavor characteristics may come into play for me as well

Maybe there are one or two other things I’m overlooking, but that’s the best I can usually do with wine evaluations. I do, also, agree with one of the prior posters who said that there are certain descriptors in tasting notes that can influence wine choice.

Both extremes are useless. Outside of situations where you know each others’ palates, the "this is good’ type comments don’t convey enough information. The 15 adjective Parkeresque comments convey so much as to be useless too, and often intimidate people who don’t get a dozen distinct flavors from a glass on first sniff.

The point of notes to me has always been to communicate to others what I tasted in the glass insofar as words can do that. So, what I do used to do was to use a middle ground where I tried to convey the characteristics of the fruit (bright red, dark like blackberry, stone fruits like pear, etc.) and then i tried to convey a couple scents I got on the nose and some information about the structure and acid.

However, I’ve come to the conclusion that notes written like this about a group of wines all from the same region will tend to sound alike. In most cases the differences are small and I think that’s what takes people in the Parkeresque direction - how to convey subtle differences between wines that really are quite similar.

This is one reason I no longer write TNs - I don’t have an obligation to work at conveying those differences since I’m not a critic and, while I sometimes wish I was still in note taking mode so I could share notes on really cool things that are uncommon - a Sauzet Le Montrachet, a 74 Heitz 'Martha’s" etc., I realized that the things that drive those into the ‘incredibly special’ realm just aren’t things you can capture in notes… and that were I to try I’d lose the moment. Since most of my wine drinking is over meals with friends, that’s not something I’m willing to do.

“stone fruits like pear”

Have I been missing some new kind of pear with a stone instead of small, thin seeds?

[snort.gif] [snort.gif] [snort.gif]

You know, Roberto, the pear that grows on a bush.

Yes, you have Roberto. It’s very special. Sorry, can’t share… They look very much like peaches… oh wait… dammit.

I think that is unfortunate. The sensible view is that all tasting notes* are like still images, from one angle, of a 3-D movie. Even with the Rashomon-effect, it is possible to capture a reasonably accurate idea from the combination of all even when no single one is accurate**.

  • Aside from truly controlled tasting panels like are run by major food companies or IFF.

** I have long thought that one could run a statistical analysis of flavor-descriptors over enough people and create a virtual-taster whose accuracy was on par with lab equipment.

A.

Pork tastes good.

White Zin does not

I totally agree with Lynch. I started out being sucked in to wines by effusive notes, almost always by the various aromas and flavors perceived by the writer.

Therein the problem… I learned that my senses work differently from anyone else’s. But concentration, power, balance, mouthfeel, length of finish and acidity can be shared a great deal more, and these should be the focus of a note, IMHOP.

Though, reading effusive notes can be a great deal of fun.

I try to write notes on most of the wines I drink. I often use adjectives. I write the notes for myself as it helps me to remember the wine.

My wife on the other hand has a binary system. Buy again or Don’t buy again. In the end, hers is the more important, but I still like my system (at least for me).

When I read others notes, if I know the author, i prefer to see notes that convey emotion. This is very difficult and a very small percentage of notes are written this way. My second choice is for descriptors as it gives me a sense of what the wine was like (assuming I know the author’s style).

“stone fruits like pear”

Have I been missing some new kind of pear with a stone instead of small, thin seeds?

And Roberto hit on one of the fundamental problems with most notes - most people just aren’t very good writers. I’ll be generous and suggest that it’s because when people post TNs, they’re PWI. But also, people just don’t learn to convey their thoughts in writing any more. Some people struggle to find the fifty cent word when the five cent word will do just as well, under the misguided assumption that it will make them seem more weighty and intellectual.

For example, I’ve heard people describe an aroma as reductive when they are trying to describe bell pepper notes, over-ripe notes, and brett. The only one who actually had an argument for his use of the word, and a good argument actually, was the guy who suggested that it was a jammy, concentrated aroma like a sauce reduction.

Same goes for “mineral”, “earth”, and God knows what else. Using a thesaurus without any clue as to what the words are is not a good way to write.

So in that sense, Kermit is right on the money. If you liked the wine and if someone trusts your opinion, that’s sufficient. If you can describe a million different tastes and aromas that you may or may not actually detect, that’s less useful.

Oh bullshit. I just made a mistake and was thinking of one thing, wrote another. Get off your high horse.


And this is why I don’t do notes anymore. I don’t know most of you and never will (in the sense of meeting up and sharing a dinner or two) and I just can’t convey why the Le Montrachet made me so happy had me saying “THIS is why I love white Burgundy!” I could describe the wine in detail, (well, not now, but if I’d taken notes) but that just doesn’t really get across the full sensory and emotional impact of having the wine in your mouth, tasting it and smelling it.

Same thing for the 2 wines I had tonight, a 1996 Chambolle AC from Roumier and a Barolo ‘Arborina’ from Altare. Lovely wines, the nose on the Altare was special… but a few words doesn’t really convey the sensation. To this degree, I can agree with Kermit, that you can’t really get across how a wine tastes in a few sentences and that adding more adjectives doesn’t really solve the issue. Where I disagree is that simply saying “This is really good” doesn’t do much for the reader either. Occasionally a TN will jog my sense memory but that’s not important enough for me to whip out a Moleskine or notebook at dinner with friends and write up notes - I’d rather spend the time talking to my friends.

If that last sentence is true, you’re not human.

You very likely have different sensitivities than some others and you might not have experienced a certain item the writer refers to, so that descriptor doesn’t mean anything to you but you have the same senses as the rest of us and (barring some medical condition) they cover, broadly speaking, the same perceptual range.

In fact, that’s the entire basis for shared communication - the fact that we all percieve the world in roughly the same way. There are exceptions (synesthesia, color-blindness, supertasters and, of course, out and out loss of a sense) but outside of something like this people need to get over the idea human sense vary so wildly that we would see, taste or smell so differently that we can’t communicate. We do… every day.

Peter,

I didn’t take Lynch’s comments to cut quite so clearly as “adjectives are useless” and “simply liking the wine is the bottom line.”

He seemed to present the notion that deconstructing the wine into masses of constituent aromas and flavors–I think he said “writers who list ten different perfumes”–is not only something he doesn’t do himself, but can also be off-putting (his word) to the consumer. He didn’t elaborate on the last point, but I suspect that he feels it sets up a competitive or challenge environment, where the consumer feels pressure to acknowledge the elderberry notes or whatever that the “pro” senses. It certainly seems that Lynch himself isn’t into “one-up-manship” judging by the way he handled Vaynerchuck’s questions, so it follows that the subtle challenge that’s issued by a string of adjectives would not be appealing to him, either.

He went on to say that it’s tricky ground for someone to sell a wine on the condition it smells like this or that, when in fact, the aromatic profile of the wine is so transitory, yet, when V. asked him to talk about the wine they were tasting, he went on to say it had “honied” aspects.

So, I think it’s not that he doesn’t use adjectives on principle, but rather that he uses them circumspectly and prefers to consider the overall quality of the wine as a whole rather than focusing on parsing particular qualities of the wine.

To what extent his philosophy is driven by, or supports the value of, the brand “Kermit Lynch” is another can of worms, but my gut says–and I don’t know Lynch–that he’s not so vain and crass, but yet recognizes that his trade and stock is in the style and quality of wine he has selected. He’s from the old school, the Schoonmaker school, and while domaine names and domaine bottling are elevated, he also influences the winemaking directly, and in doing so, creates a “Kermit Lynch style.”

Chaad,

I tend to agree with your comments, though I kindof got the feeling that the use of the word “honied” was almost an acquiescence to a barrage of adjectives from Gary. I should invest another hour in the videos to see if my reaction is still the same. I found Lynch’s take on this in such stark contrast to Vaynerchuk that it fascinated me. It also helped me feel a bit more comfortable with my own perspective on this. I’ve never gotten quite comfortable with the use of much more than very basic aroma and flavor adjectives. The idea that a ‘normal’ person would know the profile of a gooseberry has never given me the warm fuzzies about this technique.

Does anyone know if Kermit has written specifically on this subject?

The idea that a ‘normal’ person would know the profile of a gooseberry has never given me the warm fuzzies about this technique.

But if the aromas are very much like gooseberry and the taster knows that, should they refrain from using the more specific adjective just because some or even most people won’t have smelled or tasted one?

But togetherheaven on earth! [winner.gif]

Of course not. I was just alluding to the relative obscurity of some of the terminology used. Maybe gooseberries are not that obscure to some?