The linguistics professor Adrienne Lehrer does not know the meaning of the word diplomatic. Nor does she know what people are talking about when they say "bright", "big-boned", "reticent", "svelte" or "gossamer-like". And she is particularly baffled by the term "funky". Well let's be fair: none of us knows what funky means, in any context.
Prof Lehrer was actually complaining that drink writers are using this type of language as a device to sustain the public's interest in wine and that, although they might be fun, to most of us, such descriptions are utterly "meaningless".
Up to a point. I defy any amateur wine drinker armed only with a florid description - say, "terrific blackberry typicity with a bitter-chocolate undertone cut by a charred richness . . . The tannins are civilised and courtly . . . it has subtlety yet muscle, litheness yet strength, personality with a delicious, unforced rotundity of expression" (to take a recent effort by Malcolm Gluck) - to make a positive identification in a vinous identity parade. And that was precisely the sort of experiment that led Prof Lehrer to conclude that wine journalists may as well write in Polish, for all the clarity they bring to the subject.
Yet Gluck does tell us something about the Domaine de la Citadelle Cabernet Sauvignon 1999 that he describes because, by golly, it sounds good, and wouldn't you like to have a glassful beside you now? Britain drinks a lot -74 per cent of us are wine drinkers and between us we despatch £7.2bn of it a year. Wine is big business and, the European wine lake notwithstanding, sales continue to grow. We have to choose our poison somehow and reviews, however crazy they might sound, are a better way of doing it than assessing the merits of the printed label on the bottle.
So what that the Greeks got by with just a hundred terms to define wine? They didn't have to contend with Argentinian wines concocted by flying Australian winemakers using grapes grown on vines originally imported from Europe, nor did they need to distinguish between aged oak barrels, new ones and woodchips. Our newly creative wine language - and it is true that it's fairly new, because all this began with a seminal lecture given by Jules Chauvet in Burgundy in 1966 - simply reflects the new diversity of the products available to us.
Still, there's more to it than that. To the trained tongues of those who keep great mental filing cabinets and databases of every wine they have ever tasted, descriptions such as "Moroccan leather" and "lively" form an exact, if complex, labelling system. Terms like "pineappley" and "grassy" are not as fanciful as they may seem. What the nose detects in the aroma of a wine are different molecules, some of which might also be found in a pineapple, say, or released into the summer air when grass is mown. We could do things the hard way and give them their chemical names, or we can make the obvious associations.
To give an example, both Muscat and Gewurtztraminer grapes carry the floral-scented linalool that is also found in orange blossom and cinnamon. I know which description I'd find most alluring - and comprehensible. Nor are words such as "civilised and courtly" such silly things to say about tannins. What tannins do when they're inside your mouth is to react with surface proteins. This makes the tissues of your cheeks and gums contract a little. If the tannins don't cause an "aggressive" (there's another winespeak favourite) tightening, I can well imagine they might seem civilised and courtly.
And I do believe that all this, slowly, is helping non-wine buffs to educate themselves and to reach a more sophisticated appreciation of what's in their glass. Hands up those who now understand something by the term "blowsy" or "meaty", or have succumbed to inventing some of their own slightly bonkers terminology.
It is true that some critics have become a bit carried away with emotive description. They've got a long way to go before they out-talk the music writers. "Music that made their cares float out of the windows of their pretty houses and into the big blue sky where the sun always shone," I read the other day. Now that's what I call creative criticism.
