Is Wine Writing Elitist and Exclusionary?

The thoughts of a linguist provide a different take on this popular riff

I hate being described as an expert. So dubbed during a podcast recording a few weeks back, I muttered my concern. The well-intentioned interviewer (Hugo Brooks from Premier Cru Podcast) assumed it was imposter syndrome. But this was not false modesty on my part.

To be an expert implies that you know everything about a subject, that you are a source, the fount of all knowledge. As a writer and a journalist, I’m more of an observer - questioning, listening, researching and communicating about what I observed. My personal views are often challenged, sometimes permanently altered by these interactions. The true experts in my world are historians, botanists, oenologists, biochemists and the core practitioners themselves - winemakers and growers.

My heat of the moment reaction against the word ‘expert’ was instinctive, but the implications ran deeper than I first realised. They relate to one of the wine industry’s ever-increasing obsessions. We are told - or we tell each other - that wine language excludes people, that it is too Eurocentric, elitist, sexist, even racist, that it must change and that it is broken. All of those linked articles, and many others just a Google away, focus on a single issue: lexicon. They highlight adjectives and terms used as metaphors or analogies that are problematic in our modern world. Feminine, masculine and sexy are definitely out. Some will take offence at fat, rustic, new world, old world or exotic. And so it goes on.

I have so far stayed out of these discussions. As a white middle-class European male, I don’t have a seat at the table. But the sentiments trouble me. How can we artificially rewrite or change language? Surely it has to evolve naturally. As it always has.

This ethical puzzle seemed impossible to solve. But then I stumbled upon some wisdom that made me rethink the entire topic.