For many years now, I’ve pondered the notion of “wine writing” as a self-referential exercise.

Whenever you describe a wine, you’re not actually describing the wine but rather your experience tasting the wine (or experiencing the wine). Even when you tell the “story” of a wine, you are ultimately describing your own story.

Students of 20th-century critical theory will remember Gertrude Stein’s 1933 book The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. It is an “autobiography” not written by the subject but rather by her partner.

Many before me have called the work a “new paradigm” in Western narrative where the author (in this case, Stein) explores her own perceptions and experiences by purporting to be the subject and author. In doing so, she presaged one of the great conundra of the post-war Deconstruction movement where critical theorists like Barthes and Derrida declared that the “author was dead” (until Eco decided the author was actually still alive).

Stein’s book is one that comes up in my seminars on wine communications in the grad program at the Slow Food University of Gastronomic Sciences in Piedmont.

Reading through the examples of the “tyranny of the tasting note” in Eric Asimov’s “memoir and manifesto” How to Love Wine (2012), it’s abundantly clear that the writers in question are not describing wine but rather their experience tasting the wine in a given sitting. And my analogy here is that Stein is not describing the life of Alice B. Toklas but rather her perception of that life.

In writing a tasting note for a given wine, instead of saying “this is what the wine tastes like,” it would be more precise to say “this is what the wine tasted like to me when I tasted it that day.” The infamous case of Matt Kramer a wine writer from the 2000s saying [updated March 4, 2024] that Bartolo Mascarello tasted like “wet dog” “a warm room with two dogs in it” comes to mind in this context [updated March 4, 2024]. Instead of saying “this is what the wine tastes like,” he should have said, “this is what the wine tasted like to me on the day that I tasted it.”

[As Mr. Kramer recently pointed out to me, it was not him but rather a colleague of his at the time that wrote the note. For more on the episode of the wine that tasted like “a warm room with two dogs in it,” see this post by Craig Camp.]

But it wasn’t until recently that I realized that wine writing isn’t just an exercise in Deconstruction. It finally occurred to me that wine writing is actually ekphrastic in nature. The Greek term ekphrasis denotes the art of describing a work of art. And that is exactly what happens when we describe a wine.

Not only do we not tell our own story — our own experience as opposed to an empirical evaluation of the wine — but we perform that story. Along the way, we can’t help but compete against our peers and even ourselves as we try to excel as wine communicators.

Or do we?

I’m still working it out. Thanks for following along as I do…