In Defense Of Her (And Other Wine Words We Hate)
This episode of Off The Grid: I throw boats under the bus in order to make the case for how wine is nature personified.
This article is a part of the series, Off The Grid, where we deep dive the untechnical words we use to describe wine, and sometimes discover more. This series is paywalled, but the early articles are not.
It started when I asked my Instagram followers to describe what they meant when they called a wine “elegant.” Heidi at @winesofthetimes responded, “Nothing - because I never say that”—with a laughing emoji.
Her response reminded me that throughout the world of wine talkin’, people have developed strong aversions to certain descriptors. Choosing the words to describe a sniff of wine is a creative pursuit, and like all art, strong reactions—both positive and negative—follow.
Some of these offensive words, it has been argued, reveal the shortcomings of the speaker, like the choice to assign machismo descriptors to big, bold wines, and the arguably lazy “feminine” to light, floral wines. It’s 2024, and men are light, dainty, elegant, and floral as they please.
So it may surprise you that this chronically angry feminist can often be heard referring to wine with she/her/hers pronouns. But to me, every wine is a she, indiscriminately.
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