A lexicon is a language’s catalog of words, its complete set of meaningful units. Lexicon derives from the Greek lexikon, “book of words,” from lexis, “word.”
Lexicon is also used casually to refer to a subset of words embraced by specialists in a particular domain, a professionalized vocabulary.
Wine has its own lexicons, not one but many. The language of wine includes terms in common vernacular use, like smooth, fruity, and bold. But there have also been concerted efforts to formalize wine terminology to aid learning, evaluation, marketing, and credentialing. The results have greatly influenced wine vocabulary over the last half century.
Modern antecedents
In the early part of the 20th century, commentary about wine focused principally on the wine’s provenance and typicity. The field was dominated by British writers who had deep familiarity with European wine history. They tended to highlight the wine’s enduring characteristics instead of its immediate flavor sensations. The writing was evaluative rather than strictly descriptive, the commentator rendering pronouncements about the wine’s quality, collectability, and adherence to norms. Personification was common, the texts blossoming with descriptors like muscular, robust, refined, masculine, feminine, gamine, lithe, or elegant.
By the mid-twentieth century, after Repeal and two World Wars and during an era of expanding globalization, Americans were re-exposed to the world’s cuisines and wines. Importers sprang up to put European wines onto U.S. tables, while the Judgment of Paris taught Americans their own wine was worth discovering. The newly wine-curious needed ways to understand and talk about wine that fit their own reference frames. Pronouncements about “typicity” were ineffective for those unfamiliar with classical regions, styles, and producers. It didn’t help that the language of wine was the language of territory, and the original foreign-sounding names and descriptions were freely used.
During the 1970s, publications like Wine Spectator and Wine Enthusiast launched to address consumers’ dawning vinous interest. The writing aimed to educate, enlighten, encourage exploration, stimulate thirst, and prompt a sale. It needed to be accessible and readable, friendly, warm, and engaging. And it needed to assume limited prior knowledge of or experience with wine. The writing was vernacular, lightly poetic, sometimes florid, and swiftly earned the nickname “winespeak.”
The new lexicons
A subset of the wine industry, frustrated by the imprecision of the modern wine discourse, set out to establish strict lexical rules for discussing wine. Significantly, the attention moved away from considerations of provenance and typicity and toward flavor attributes. It was a shift from origin to experience, from “What is this wine about?” to “What is this wine about to me?”
Three main approaches emerged:
