Is There a Better Way to Talk About Wine?

When the wine critic James Suckling described a Château Haut-Brion in the pages of Wine Spectator in 1992, he needed just a single phrase to sum up the taste: “Big and meaty, with lots of fruit and full tannins, but featuring a sweetness and silkiness on the finish.” At the time, the field of wine criticism was gaining momentum—the magazine’s circulation that year surpassed a hundred thousand—and written tasting notes were moving beyond encyclopedic reference books aimed at wealthy men. When Suckling sampled the same Haut-Brion again—a bottle from the acclaimed 1989 vintage—in 2009, his description of the wine’s flavor carried on for seven sentences, evoking cigarettes, pastries, and saunas in his promise of “perfumed aromas of subtle milk chocolate, cedar, and sweet tobacco.”