Is Finesse Finished?

Matt Kramer
Posted: November 30, 2004

For all the handwringing about scoring wines, the naysayers miss—forgive me—the point. It's not the numbers; it's the words. Words give wine meaning; numbers give wine (and readers) order.

Because of this, it's a big mistake to brush off words as "mere semantics." In life, you get what you ask for. Ditto for wine. Words reflect the demands you make on the wine in front of you. When we taste, we also carry on an internal conversation. Wine, unlike soda pop, is a cognitive pleasure. It excites thought, which, of course, is translated into words.

Over the years people have asked me how I taste. "In French," I answer. The questioner generally looks baffled. He or she was thinking about tasting methodology: Are you a morning-only taster? Do you concentrate more on the scent or the aftertaste? How important is color to you?

These are all legitimate concerns. But really, there's only one important consideration: What vocabulary are you using? As Albert Camus pointed out, "To name a thing is to make it real."

Take "finesse," for example. There was a time when this one term—a quality, really—was foremost in many tasters' minds. Clearly it's a Frenchified version of "fine-ness." And that's as good a definition as any. Those of us who took our wine-tasting lessons from the French—and that was pretty much everybody outside of California prior to, say, 1980—were taught that finesse is essential to fine wine.

Finesse is about delivery, how a wine's flavors and texture are handed to you. Think of a basketball player going in for a layup. It can be done brutally or with, well, finesse. But wine, unlike basketball, isn't a matter of winning and losing based only on whether the ball goes through the hoop. That's why finesse matters so much more with wine.

Today, there's a heated debate about whether modern wines are excessively alcoholic and brutish. Such wines are said to "taste well," but not "drink well." They lack finesse. California and Australia are often fingered as the culprits.

Is it true? Hard to say. Some of today's wines are indeed guilty, while others are innocent of the accusation. In basketball, even a 300-pound center can score with finesse. Big wines don't necessarily have to be brutes.

But I will say this much: California is certainly responsible for changing wine's vocabulary. "Finesse" is now the wine word that dare not speak its name.

During the 1960s and 1970s, professors at the enology program at UC, Davis, sought to eradicate wine-tasting terms that they thought were inexact or unscientific. The leader of this effort was the late professor Maynard Amerine. He succeeded.

The past two generations of California winemakers had their vocabulary—and thus their thoughts—shaped by an insistence on a narrow set of approved words. Finesse was not among them. "This word needs a rest, along with 'delicate' and 'elegant,'" wrote Amerine in his influential 1976 book, Wines: Their Sensory Evaluation.

In fact, Amerine and his coauthor, professor Edward B. Roessler, put forth a list of 113 words that met with their disapproval. The list was prefaced with this disclaimer: "It is not our intent to condemn the following terms (although some of them deserve it) for your wine vocabulary, but merely to warn you to use them with caution, if at all."

Like an unusually severe (itself an unacceptable wine term) monastic order, aspiring wine monks are urged to renounce terms such as austere, chewy, coarse, delicate, elegant, fat, finesse, flabby, flinty, full, hard, harsh, intense, metallic, powerful, pungent, rich, robust, silky, smoky, supple, tough and velvety, among others.

Make no mistake: Language shapes thought. Your wine words matter because they are a demand you place upon the wine you're tasting.

If you don't ask a wine if it has finesse, then that quality will eventually cease to be a consideration. Like the proverbial corpse in the living room that everybody steps over, "finesse" will become less important because it's never mentioned. Wine values, like any others, lose their life essence if not invoked.

Which wine world would you prefer to live in? One where finesse is sought and its absence duly noted or celebrated? Or one where "toasty oak" dominates the discussion? The choice (of words) is yours to make.

Matt Kramer has contributed regularly to Wine Spectator since 1985.