The Back Forty
By Roger Pond

I guess I’ll never be a wine expert. I just can’t get the terminology down.

A newspaper story about a wine fancier’s workshop says “sweaty saddle,” “bubble gum” and “cotton candy” are a few of the terms experts use to describe various flavors in wines. The famed sommelier leading the workshop encourages folks to make up their own terms to describe what they taste in wines.

A sales manager for one winery says she finds herself using “masculine” and “feminine” quite often this year. That reminds me of the last time I worked on our plumbing; I found myself using certain words over and over again.

The whole idea of making up terms to describe wine takes me back to the wine tasting I attended back in the 1970s. I was a county agent at the time, and every county with a wine grape industry was invited to send an agent to the research field day at the experiment station.

We listened to reports all morning and tasted the station’s wines most of the afternoon. The word around the state was that researchers at the station had been making wine for nearly 30 years, and they planned to stick with it until they got a good one.

There were some experts in attendance, though. There were vineyard owners, wine makers and wine writers from several states and Canada. This wasn’t any jug-of-wine slurp down, either. It was a real tasting where we were given a couple of glasses, water for rinsing our mouths and a little can to spit in.

The idea was to take a sip of wine, swirl it around in your mouth and spit it into the can. That seemed a horrible waste to me, but what do I know about these things?

Among the three or four county agents in attendance was my old friend, Fred (name changed in case he remembers where I live). Fred sat across the room and I could tell he wasn’t any more comfortable with this shindig than I was. He wasn’t much of a wine drinker, either, and probably never owned a corkscrew in his life.

So, we were tasting the station’s wines and dutifully spitting them out, while the wine connoisseurs were making up terms. “This one is quite supple and muscular, but I would like it with a bit more nose,” one fellow said.

I glanced across the table and noticed this man had plenty of nose himself, and probably shouldn’t be criticizing anybody’s wine.

I tasted a Chablis I thought was a bit chicken coop and a Cabernet with a bad case of cow’s breath. I kept these perceptions to myself, however.

This went on for some time, until we had tasted 30 wines or more. Then, a man from British Columbia’s Okanagan Valley stood up and said, “I have a couple of cases in the trunk of my car I would like for everyone to taste.”

This man brought in a Riesling wine he had made in his basement and began to pour it. Eyebrows started to quiver as the experts sniffed the wine and swirled it, and held it up to the light. One fellow said the wine was lacking in ambience – and maybe a tad on the fruity side.

That’s when I looked over at Fred. I could see Fred was still sipping, but he apparently stopped spitting a long time ago.

He took one sip of that Okanagan Valley wine and said, “I don’t care what anybody says. This is the best darned wine we’ve had all day!”

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