We can skip the lengthy intro about how consumer patterns are gendered, the dining experience itself is rooted in gendered traditions, certain foods are considered "manly" or "girly" and just get to wine descriptors. I particularly enjoyed a 2017 Snooth article, and its intro: "Esteemed wine critics like Robert Parker and Antonio Galloni employ gender-positive terms in their tasting notes without compunction. Masculine wines are commonly associated with structure and power, while feminine wines can be perceived as delicate and thin." In our discussions about building vocabularies to talk about wine and the concept of wine notes, I thought it would be interesting to take a small glance at this, and remind us all to try to delete using gendered terms when we think/talk about how a wine tastes. It's annoying and lazy!
There are a few articles, like from Wine Enthusiast that shamelessly approve the gendered terms when encouraging the use of "feminine" in describing a wine: “Imagine a wine that has similar characteristics to a woman and her best qualities,” says Wheatley. “A wine that is light, refined and delicate might be called feminine; the polar opposite of those so-called masculine qualities in wine—strong, muscular, larger and bigger.”
Basically, now that we are all wine geniuses, I encourage us all to be aware of and disapproving of how stupid it is to call a wine masculine or feminine. "Cougar juice" is also enough to make me never want to buy white wine again, but it is hard to disagree with the data on that one...
I was once in a fairly nice restaurant for dinner and ordered a cocktail. The waiter came back and told me the bartender wanted to double check that's what I wanted because it's typically for men. I was so offended I ordered 3 of them (even though it turned out they weren't good) and drank them all. I also told the waiter to tell the bartender he is a fool, but I'm not sure the word made it back. I'm sure that the same goes for men who order the "girly cocktails" or a particularly feminine, flowery glass of wine instead of some "strong, aggressive Cab."
I called it lazy before and I'll call it lazy again. The more we can learn, the better our vocabulary and astuteness gets, the less we need to instinctively rely on silly gendered aroma descriptors when we have millions of words out there at our disposal! It's no surprise that a brief search through Alder Yarrow's site proves that he doesn't rely on these descriptors very much at all...he knows what he's talking about!
Hi Marion, thanks for this important reminder to seek out a less gendered way of describing wines.
ReplyDeleteI wonder if the gendered terminology we unintentionally or intentionally use when describing wines is partly a failure of the English language as well as how we decide to employ the language. For instance, consider the following etymology of a word that is incessantly used to describe a wine's character, the word "delicate":
...late Middle English (in the sense ‘delightful, charming’): from French délicat or Latin delicatus, of unknown origin. Senses also expressed in Middle English (now obsolete) include ‘voluptuous,’ ‘self-indulgent,’ ‘fastidious,’ and ‘effeminate.’
In this example, and surely in countless others, the descriptive words that are available for us to use have gendered origins. Even if we avoid the obvious faux pas of describing a wine as "masculine" or "feminine," I think the problem you point out reaches further to the adjectives we use to describe sensations in general. How do we avoid this problem? Is there a way to re-appropriate words that are already commonly understood?