Hmm, perhaps just a hint of humbug

Click here for more Evening Standard columnists

We've been rumbled. The language of wine is a load of old blackcurrants (no, make that "fat melons" with "hedgerow fruit and herbs"), and those who spout it are mystificatory hierophants (or, in common parlance, pseuds). That, at any rate, is the conclusion being drawn from a recent piece of French research whose findings have been published in the current edition of New Scientist.

A French researcher called Gil Morot discovered, by the agreeably simple stratagem of tinting white wines red, that his sample group of wine tasters immediately began to smell red fruits and substances instead of the white and yellow repertoire they had previously detected - when the white wine was still white. To be fair, Monsieur Morot didn't have the tough trio of Oz Clarke, Jancis Robinson and the all-powerful American taster Robert Parker sitting in front of him, but a group of eager-toplease French undergraduates.

Nonetheless, he concludes that "olfactory descriptions are completely subjective". You might as well chose your fruit 'n' nut wine descriptions, in other words, by pulling the handle on a slot machine and seeing what chugs up to the line. All us wine writers should be sent packing.

This, it has to be admitted, is a view which commands considerable public sympathy. Wine writing is commonly seen as ludicrously extravagant, even meaningless, and its use is one of the alienating factors in making the uninitiated feel excluded by "wine snobs" from their world. What do we make of a red wine said to be "dry with a hint of rustic sod"? Just how do you feel about "superbly glossy tannins and strikingly berried fruit in first-class, textured collusion"? Can you immediately imagine a wine which "has a warm, earthy aroma (touch of basil), stunningly well-concentrated and murky tannins, and an evolved finish of hedgerow fruits and herbs, and that ineffable quality the Spaniards call duende?? These are descriptions from The Guardian's Superplonk column of 17 March, 15 September and 16 June this year.

There is an irony in all this, which is that fanciful formulations of this sort were actually meant to be a stratagem to open up the world of winetasting and make it more accessible to the uninitiated. Thirty years ago, wine descriptions would have read something like this. "There is now a suggestion of evolution on the colour. Lovely nose. Really sophisticated complex fruit. Fine acidity but rich enough so not hard or austere Good tannins but they don't stick out. Very very subtle and complex at the end." Some wine writers, in fact, still write like this: it's a quotation from Clive Coates's 1997 Cote d'Or. When Jilly Goolden and Oz Clarke introduced wine tasting to television, they quickly worked out that if they began with "a suggestion of evolution", it would take about seven seconds for people in Barnsley and Chelmsford to decide they'd rather watch the ice hockey play-offs from Calgary. To keep them watching, we ended up with lots of armwaving and "wheelbarrows full of ugli fruit" instead.

Even great writers tend to wallow when it comes to wine writing ("a beaker full of the warm South,/Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene", gushes Keats), which led the late Auberon Waugh to conclude that good wine writing actually needed to be camped up a little. "Dark," writes Richard Neill in the recently published Booze, "as the bruises on a cowboy's bum, Syrah (or Shiraz, as the Aussies call it) is the hot red grape of the moment. If Tom Jones wanted to serve a wine that would provoke as much knicker-throwing as his Delilah performance, this is the grape to choose."

Up to you to decide whether it works or not, but a description like that won't leave anyone wishing they were studying the Highway Code instead. There is, in fact, a problem facing anyone who wants to try to describe wines, which is that human beings (who, as any dog knows, can't smell for toffee) omitted to develop a language of scent and flavour of any sophistication. Once we've been through primary categorisations like "sweet" and "sour", the words cease to exist. To offer a fair description of the smell and flavour of a mouth-watering bottle of Chablis, wine writers have to employ metaphor. We have to plunder the rest of the sensual world for analogies. This is a hazardous business; few of us have the skill to make it work every time.

Like all wine writers, I have written descriptions in the past of embarrassing awfulness (I'm still trying to work out what I meant by "a sweetscented, low-flying overview of fine-snipped fronds"). When it works, though, a beautifully crafted wine description can bring almost as much pleasure as the wine itself. "It is hard but not harsh, reminiscent of stones and minerals, but at the same time of green hay (a delicious sort of sour taste enters into it when it reaches about 10 years of age, and its goldengreen eye flashes meaningfully." This is Hugh Johnson on Chablis, selected from a typically carefully crafted paragraph in his many-million-selling World Atlas of Wine.

Robert Parker, by contrast, is an altogether less-subtle writer: he tends to accumulate what wine jargon calls "descriptors" ("toasty new oak intertwined with gobs of jammy cherry fruit") like a brickie filling his hod. He does, though, also give wines scores, and those scores are many thousands of times more influential than his words.

Why? It's not hard to guess. Points and scoring systems have become so influential in the wine world precisely because of the kind of hyperinflation which characterises wine language. The words may be beyond us; points, at least, everyone can understand.