Pendock Unfiltered - Deconstructing winespeak

Friday, 28 January, 2005
Neil Pendock
'Linearity' was last year’s buzz word that somehow got overlooked both by the Platter Guide glossary of frequently used terms and phrases, and Dave Huges’ South African Dictionary of Wine. Ascribing geometric properties to wine is however all the rage as yet another descriptor is added to the winespeak lexicon, writes Neil Pendock.
A first sighting was at the Fairbairn Capital Trophy Wine Show when WINE magazine interviewed Michael Fridjhon who noted that to 'outline the aesthetics that he as chairman wants to see applied during the judging of the show, he came up with the concept of linearity or fruit purity.' In a report on Fairbairn, Christian Eedes adopted this definition of linearity as 'fruit purity' and hailed it as an important concept. 'Good Sauvignon Blanc hinges on linearity' was one message but confusingly, 'it is possible to make a commercially successful Chardonnay where linearity plays a very small part in the wine’s appeal.' For greatness, straightness seems to be the sine qua non: 'for Chardonnay or Sauvignon Blanc or any other variety' in order to have an expression of place (the holy grail of terroiriste wine making) 'it all comes down to linearity.' As Huey Lewis and the News might have put it: 'it’s hip to be linear.' As an abstract concept, linearity is an unfortunate term as in mathematics and engineering, linearity is almost an insult. Interesting problems are mostly non-linear and to a mathematical winemaker the epithet of linearity would be synonymous with simple. A far more appealing descriptor would be comparison to a fractal curve that has elegance, symmetry and as much complexity as you like at any scale of observation - the antithesis of a straight line which is after all, simply the shortest distance between two points. Steven Spurrier was in the winelands in August, selecting wine for South African Airways, and his interpretation of vinous linearity was a little different. 'It’s all Michel Bettane’s fault,' he laughed. Spurrier traced the concept of linearity back to Bettane’s idea of longueiline a made-up word in French which Spurrier translates as 'longer than you can taste' i.e. very persistent. As chairman of the Decanter World Wine Awards, a sort of global Fairbairn, his geometrical insights carry a fair amount of Euclidean weight. Bettane was a judge at Fairbairn, which puts him on the scene of the crime, and linearity is also a philosophical good fit. Before submerging himself in the wine world on a full-time basis, Bettane was a professor of Classics at Fontainebleau. For a one-time French academic to invent a new word to describe an idea, Bettane is simply following in the footsteps of French radical philosopher Jacques Derrida, who invented Deconstructionism. To define Deconstructionism is something of a contradiction in terms (Derrida himself questioned whether it can in fact be defined) but it is essentially a subverting of philosophy via a dismantling of language to expose contradictions and false assumptions. Deconstructionist techniques have been successfully applied in architecture, literature and fine art and longueiline could be the first attempt at deconstructing winespeak, a field overflowing with fuzzy concepts and wooly thinking. The anatomy of the word is intriguing: it has that certain je ne sais quoi that French terms confer in English with terroir a good example. Being linguistically close to longueur, it has that Proustian languidness that is well suited to fine wine and being difficult to pronounce, raises the required barriers to appropriation by non-insiders. Deconstructionism is by no means universally accepted. Guardian guru Peter Lennon comments, 'the French excel in fabricated terms of shifty meaning which make it impossible to detect at what point philosophical speculation turns to gibberish. Deconstruction is a theory which appears to lend itself most readily to babbling obfuscation.' Which makes longueiline a perfect addition to the vocabulary of winespeak! A deep philosophical issue lies behind adding the idea of linearity to wine: can a concept exist without a word to describe it and if so, what did we do B.B. (before Bettane)? Research by the American linguist Benjamin Lee Whorf in the 1930s seems to indicate that language not only influences thought, but more strongly, determines it. So whether in the context of 'purity of fruit' or 'persistence of flavour', linearity is a concept no self-respecting wine anorak can ignore, or at least finesse.